Research, change and men

So...last night my rat and I were watching Glee when one of the characters started in to a song that might as well have been Moroccan Sufi Music for all I knew.

She said to me, "hey, is that song by so and so?" 

I just shook my head and said, "baby, I don't know what you just said and I've never heard this song before. How would you go about looking it up?"

Now, I thought that I was smarty father because she'd have to say...well...I could go search on Glee and the name of the episode and get the song list or that she'd go to the Glee web page or if she was really smart she could wait to the end credits and either see the song there OR the name of the person who sang it then look them up on IMDB...or....whatever. I thought I would take a moment and snealkilly teach her something.

She said, "Shazam!"

I just hung my head in shame. I was punked by an 11 year old rat. Of course she'd know about and use Shazam. Why wouldn't she? While the song played she downloaded the app, turned it on, then got the name of the song, the singer and so on. 

I felt expressly old.

NOTE: For those that don't know Shazam is an application on your iPhone that can listen to a song and not only tell you about it but give you ways to buy it. Very goovy.

In that moment I realized in 1080p high definition how different her world is from the one I grew up in. It's a parent's universal lament that their world is different from their children's world. Of course it is. The world is filled with constant change. It proves that we must learn to embrace change or be run over by it. Today I find myself texting with my rat who is in her bedroom. Learn to communicate with your children in their language (and medium) because, while they may speak your language, they choose to not use it.

I felt so...old...and adult. It was icky. I wanted a popsicle and a bag of Legos to offset the emotional hit.

As an adult I now have to think more about retirement and less about what's playing at the movies. I have to think about things like what order to go shopping and less about being excited that I "might" get a cookie from the Great American Cookie Company. I have to remember to go to the doctor for my check up and to pay my car tag and pick up the dry cleaning. Being an adult means that we must lose touch with ourselves as children but never forget how to be a child.

I really can't tell you what it means to be a man.

A man is not an old boy.

I mean, it's not the decisions we make or the friends we keep.

It's not what we have or do.

It's not when we go or how long we stay.

Being a man is not the ability to make a child, fire a gun, grill a steak or drive a car. 

Do you have to be a man to be a father? I don't know.

Do you have to be a father to be a man? No.

I could list fifty decisions I've made that show I am most assuredly not a man.

I could list fifty that show I am (many of them are the same decisions.)

A man keeps his promises but sometimes breaks them with cause.

A man provides for his family but sets difficult priorities.

Sometimes being a man means making the wrong decision for the right reasons. 

Sometimes being a man means we have to fail on purpose because it's is the right thing to do.

Being a man means telling yourself no.

Being a man means letting go when holding on is easier.

As a man we are expected to die to protect our loved ones.

As a man we sacrifice in silence so that others will never know how close it really was.

We don't panic but we do urge quiet caution.

We don't lose our temper, but sometimes we we put it away on purpose.

...and...

It is only in the darkness that we quietly admit we are scared to those we trust most.

It is only in the darkness that we quietly hold our loved ones and let them tell us everything is going to be okay.

Tupperware

"Organized people are too lazy to look for things."

I like to think I'm an organized person. 

I said I like to THINK I'm an organized person. I didn't say I AM an organized person. There are certain aspects of my life that are disorganized. There are places in my home and finances that I don't have buttoned up. I'm working on it but I think everyone has a little mess somewhere that keeps them sane.

That said, let's discuss organization.

I think that there are three kinds of organization. 

• Organized for function
• Organized for form
• Organized for the self 

If you organize for function, as I do, you put things in order such that most commonly used things are easier to get to than things that are not so readily necessary.

Spices are a good example of that. Here's a picture of my spice organization solution.

Spices tend to be used together so I put those near each other. Mexican, Indian and Chinese spices tend to cluster around each other but also recipe groupings occur. Chili spices like to hang out together while cookie spices populate a different area. Oh, and yes, they change location fairly frequently based on the season and my own experiments.

Clearly these are organized but they are organized by my own rules. It is a solution unique to me. 

If I wanted to I could also have organized them alphabetically so that it would be easy for you to find things but having someone else cook in my kitchen gives me agita. You might as well be pawing around in my bed stand and dresser. Yes, the kitchen is that intimate to me. It's where I live. Well, there and the computer.

I think we can agree that those are functional organizational methods.

What about form?

An organization for form might be to organize spices by color. That's great until you get something like a peppercorn medley that is made up of three or more colors. Maybe you can't remember if you thought cinnamon was red or brown or maybe you find yourself constantly grabbing the sage instead of the thyme because they look so friggin similar.

Spices are easy though. What about something like movies or books?

Here's a good example of organizing books for form and not function.

Now find me the book on Ancient European Cutlery...I'll wait.

This looks very nice but it's nearly useless. This was organized by someone who values form over function or someone who doesn't go back looking for books. Personally, I don't think this person respects books but that's just me and it's another post for another time.

Organization by form may be pretty and it may get pictures of your world in magazines but the folks that have to live with it know that it's a right royal pain in the collective ass.

Tupperware.

We all have a Tupperware drawer or cabinet that is unruly. Why? Because Tupperware looks very good when it's all neatly stacked together. You can get a ton of it in one cupboard and you can easily find exactly what you want...once. A week later the bowl got out is clean and ready to go back but you don't want to fuck around with restacking it so you just put it on top and tell yourself that you'll get to it next time. But next time never comes and within about two weeks your Tupperware cabitnet looks like you've be storing a pair of feral bobcats under your counter for all the scattered lids, cups, bowls and canisters.

What do you do?

After about six months of this putting Tupperware away is a study in speed. You open the door and chuck the bowl at the pile then try to close the door before all your shit comes piling out onto the floor. Of course once a year you decide to get organized so you pull everything out, restack it all and put it all back so that you can start all over because you're a freak like that.

Organizing things for yourself is like organizing for function but without all that thinkin'.

In my world it's the cabinets above the computer in what acts as my office. I just haven't prioritized properly organizing them so they are made up of generally similar clusters. Papers that are kinda useful go in one pile while papers that are supposed to be kept go in another. That box of shit I don't know what to do with goes at the top and that crap that doesn't neatly cluster is piled together on the bottom. I'll deal with it soon though because somewhere, in there, are all my tax papers. Ugh.

It looks disorganized to you but really it is organized solely for me. It's like my spices but the groupings don't make any sense to anyone but me. I sometimes think that how we cluster the piles of random shit in our lives is autobiographical.

• Consider any drawer in your office right now.
• Without looking name ten things that are in it.
• Open the drawer. Were you right?
• Now ask yourself, when did you put the first thing into it and what was it.
• When did you put the last?
• On the left in the middle is something. Why is it in the drawer? Is that where it belongs?
• Pull the drawer all the way out and look in the back. What's back there? What was going on in your life when you put that there? 

Where things get shoved, stored and left is a reflection of their importance to us. Things in the back of our lives are not as important as the things in the front. It's just a function of how we organize.

Then there are the things that we think we understand.

For example, one might argue that my kitchen cabinets are organized poorly. I don't disagree. I put them together in a way that I thought would be useful. In some ways they make sense and some ways they don't. It's a process. They are organized, just not well. 

Women's purses, glove compartments, the trunk of your car and your craft room are all typically examples of organizing things for you and you alone. That is to say there is no organization whatsoever. You just so happen to remember where you last put something.

What's my point in all this?

It is said that if you want to know how someone thinks, who they truly are, you just have to see their car and where they live. (NOTE: Where someone lives may be their office or kitchen or even their car...it doesn't have to be an entire house.) 

I'm going to tell you the secret to organization.

Are you ready?

You will never be organized on the outside until you are organized on the inside.

If you aren't in order it's all just Tupperware aching to burst from the cabinet.

Update on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 7:13AM by Aabacus

Ordinarily I write a post then come back later and read it, check for spelling and general grammar (to the best of my ability) then post.

In this instance I wrote it and posted immediately. If you are reading this and you read this post before I did any proper editing. I apologize. I was distracted by Tupperware aching to strangle me from across the room. 

Well, it was that or I just got distracted.

Anyway, many apologies. I think I have now fixed the worst of it.

As my readers you deserve a better effort. When you see me next you can punch me in the thorax or whatever.

Thanks.

Too much time on your hands?

Okay, it's that time again where I tip you off on some really cool things I've come across lately.

Enough chit-chat though, let's just get on with the good stuff.

iPhone apps are on deck for today but I'm sure at least some of them are available on Android or Windows phones.

Tiny Tower

When I tell you I've been playing with my Tiny Tower I'm sure the first thing you think is, "oh, that iPhone game," because none of you could possibly think "that way" now could you. 

Tiny Tower is briliantly simple, addictive, and really only loosely counts as a game. A friend of mine in college called them zombie games because they were brainless. 

In summary, you build a tower. You have two kinds of floors. Floors where people live and floors where people buy shit. It's that simple. Five people live on a floor and three people work in the shops. 

For each of the three people you have in a shop you have an offering. In the Coffee Shop you have Espressos, Tall Lattes and Frappes. Espressos are worth one coin per espresso, Lattes are two and Frappes are three. As you can imagine the store carries varying quantities of each. 

When it's time to restock an item you just tell the game to stock it and a timer starts. In the beginning these timers can take less than a minute but as you upgrade your floors the stocking can literally take several days. That is to say that you kick off a restock on Monday (real life Monday) and on Thursday it's ready. 

The same timers work for floors. Initially it's just a few hours but it can take much longer as you go higher. Floor 50 took an entire day. That is to say, I kicked it off on Friday about noon and on Saturday about noon it was ready.

What if you don't want to wait that long?

That's where they make the big money. You can buy "bux" that are used to speed up stocking, building, moving people in to an apartment, buying coins and a few other things. "Bux" are handed out by the game at fairly random intervals. 

It is possible to play the game without paying any real money beyond the $0.99 it costs from the Apple app store, but you'll soon find that maybe if you just invested $5 you could get that floor much faster. If you are tempted to spend real money I'm going to say just spend the $30.00 and get the 1,000 bux. I spent $1 then $5 and then another $5 so I ended up blowing $11 and only getting 210 bux.

It's a wonderful time waster when you are on a conference call because it requires little to no thought and gives you something to do. 

Highly recommended IF you can keep yourself from spending real money.

I dare you to try the game and not be tempted to at least spend $1.

Flick Homerun!

This is a fun and simple game for the iPhone as well.

A ball gets tossed in from the right of the screen and on the left you swipe your finger like a bat.

If you hit the ball right you knock it out of the park and score points. The farther you hit it the more points you score. If you miss the ball or otherwise make an out you lose points.

There's a red bar at the top of the screen showing you how much time you have left. A pitch decrements the bar a notch and getting points increments it. 

There are three "stats" that you can upgrade as you level up in the game: Power, Contact and Eye.

• Power upgrades let you hit the ball farther
• Contact makes it easier to hit the ball well
• Eye allows you to sneak a peek at what the next ball is (like a fast ball or a sinker).

The game is $0.99 and like many of these games you can spend real money and upgrade your stats faster than earning them directly. It's up to you but I'm enjoying doing it manually.

I played the game so much my first day that the next day I woke up with a sore arm. Yep, it's that addictive.

Pinterest

What's the easiest way to explain this app? It's kind of like a visual Twitter is how it was explained to me.

You "pin" pictures of things you like on the internet and categorize them (geek, humor, food, etc.). The "pins" go into the general buckets in the Pinterest app and everyone can see what you pinned when they are exploring. They can then choose to go to the site they came from or just "repin" them or "like" them.

It's in a closed beta now so when you go to their site you have to ask for an invitation.

Once you have your invite download the app to your iPhone and/or iPad (this thing is crazy addictive on the iPad), sign in, and have fun.

I saw a quote the other day that Pinterest is fantasy football for women. I'm not going to disagree but feel a little dirty that it's so addictive to me. I wonder what that says about...oooh, that's the bathroom I want in MY dream home. *facepalm* 

MotionX or GPS Drive (I can't tell what the name of this thing is)

Anyway, it's turn by turn navigation for the iPhone for $1. Well, it's actually $1 + $10 for one year of voice navigation but the $1 gets you a free month.

So far I have to say it's a slick presentation, significantly cheaper than any of the other turn-by-turn navigation solutions on the iPhone (my favorite is Navigon but it's $100 I think...I only paid $70 on sale and yes, I paid that much but it has sooooo saved my ass so many times it was worth it.)

You can download additional voices for the app (I'm currently enjoying "The Cougar" gggrrrowl) and the presentation is light and fun. 

What is there to say? There are a ton of options and ways to find what you are looking for. It's fast, clean and seems to be stable. 

Give it a shot for a month. I think you'll enjoy it.

Okay, that's it for today. That should keep you occupied.

Now, if you don't mind, I need to restock my Asian Cuisine and Optometrist...but first...I have sooooo got to make that salad...

...that skirt looks aweful on her...

...Ooh, luminaries made from a balloons and wax!

About trees

About ten years ago I was living in a house out north east of Atlanta and in front of that house was a crappy crape myrtle. 

For those of you not familiar with it, the crape myrtle is a tree/bush that requires a lot of dicking around. Well, in Georgia and Florida the typical management of this particular flora requires dicking around.

Now, crape myrtle A.K.A. lagerstroemia (again, the ones around us) wants to grow in a bunch of stalks all popping with leaves and flowers, like a bush. That is how it wants to live its life. That is how you will find it if you come across it in the wild. Yet, we (as in "the people") have determined that proper care requires selecting one stalk of the tree/bush and clipping all the rest. Then, allowing that single stalk to grow up and sprout leaves and flowers. No, we can't leave it at that. We have to clip the stalks and leaves and flowers from the mid point down to force this creature to put out leaves and flowers up high. Long story short, what we do is forcibly groom these things so that after some number of years you have one thick trunk about a hand's width across and ten to twelve feet tall. The top has a number of branches and the branches put out flowers. When lagerstroemia is in full bloom and "properly" managed you have a trunk and a crown of flowers. 

Sure, it can be pretty, but I find this arborial management to be the equivalent of Chinese footbinding or Japanese bonsai. That is to say, forcing something to be what it naturally is not.

I'm not sure why we do this to people, trees or animals (poodles anyone?) but it seems to be a theme for us. We're not even shy, these efforts are so much a part of our culture that, for example, if a poodle doesn't look like a pompous ass we simply don't recognize it and secretly wonder what the hell is wrong with the owner.

So, back to our crape myrtle. 

I chose to move the crape myrtle from the front yard to the back becuase I was most assuredly not going to do any dicking around with it, for one, nor was I going to pay someone to do it, two, and I'm pretty much a fan of leave things the fuck alone, three.

You may say, hey, you could have just let it grow like that in the front couldn't you? Well, I could have, but all it would do is call attention to the fact that I wasn't a big fan of mowing the yard either. Hey, everyone, this jerk isn't taking care of his yard and his crape myrtle looks like it's in desperate need of some manscaping let's fine him big bags of money and take his house.

Therefore, rather than further illustrate in fine detail my shortcomings as a horticulturalist and landscaper and maintain ownership of my hard earned funds I elected to just move the tree and replace it with a normal, non-dick around, tree.

It is also important to note that I wanted a real tree, a big tree, a tree that people would drive by some year and say, hey, that's a mighty fine tree. As far as placement, the spot for the crape myrtle was just right. It wasn't near any water lines, power lines or other underground challenges and it was the right place to shade the house once it was fully grown.

I carefully dug up the crape myrtle, moved it to the back and sat it down with every intention of digging a hole and planting it...honest! Then, using the existing hole I cleared it out a little more, put in some fertilizer and water then dropped in my newly purchased 8' tall maple and filled in the hole. I watered it and let it go.

Now, it is at this point that some people would put stakes in the ground and tie the tree off so that it won't be broken by strong winds. It's true, you will keep the tree alive longer in harsh conditions. However, what really ends up happening is you are weakening the tree. You see, as a sapling, trees are supposed to bend and sway and take some wind punishment. The swaying causes the cells in the trunk to fray and break then be replaced with new cells. That way when it is a big tree it'll be stronger and able to handle the most urgent winds. Trees that were tied off will snap in winds of a much less urgent nature and thereby crush your neighbors car. So, do you want to replace a broken sapling or discuss with your neighbor what color his new Pacifica should be? Your choice.

What did I do with the crape myrtle? Nothing. The next day I stood the crape myrtle up in a nook of dirt in the back yard where the rainwater had dug a little hole and figured that if it was meant to be it would be.

Over the years the crape myrtle not only grew but grew huge. It changed from a sickly tree to a thriving bush. It did better out of sight, un fucked with, in the back yard, than it ever did in the front and put out an awesome bunch of flowers every year. It's as if it said, "well, it's about damn time! Now a brother can get some work done." It didn't want to be out front any more than I wanted it there. 

The maple? My maple? I recently drove past my old house and saw that it was now an important tree. It has a gorgeous crown and is really starting to look exactly as I'd hoped. I smiled inwardly and got a little misty. 

Not bad for someone that knows nothing about trees.

Just an ordinary man

On New Year's day for the last two years I've posted brief reviews of the past year. Partly it's a way to remind myself that I'm still alive and partly it's because I don't want to forget the year...not that the years have really deserved much remembering as of late.

So, in keeping with that motif, let's review.

What is to be said about 2011. My wife didn't make it to Atlanta but she did bring the cat so I'd have company. That was strangely fulfilling. On a side note Ozzie figured out that she can leap from the dresser to the bed today. Great, now I can count on 20 needles driving into my ankle in the middle of the night as she underestimates the jump and tries to rescue her dignity.

My daughter got glasses in December of 2011. She's excited. What the hell happened to freak, geek and four eyes, you know, the classic insults if you looked even a hint different from the other kids? I just don't get it.

Work is as good as work can be. Honestly, I love my job and the challenges. It's been so refreshing to be valued and to provide value. If I have one resolution for 2012 it's to really work on my career. I have much more to offer so I'll focus on surfacing those skills and capabilities.

How did I spend New Years Eve? 

I watched the Xmen movies (1-3) after eating leftovers of this... (White trash french bread pizza)

 

...and went to bed early after posting this on Facebook:

2011, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. And leave the lights on! I'm still here.

Once in bed I strapped on my snazzy new CPAP machine, caught up on some Twitter/Facebook posts with Flipboard, made a quick pass through Tiny Tower (iPhone game - check it out!) and slipped into somnolent apathy.

They say (the ubiquitous they that also say you need 8 glasses of water a day and that if you play with yourself too much you'll grow hair on your palms) that whatever you were doing when you welcome in the new year sets the stage for the whole year. Well, in recent memory I've tried having sex at the "stroke" of midnight (oh COME ON! You wanted that joke!) and I've tried laughter and I've tried sleeping. Here's hoping sleeping turns out better than any of the others.

2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were, without a doubt, amazingly difficult years.

That's not to say there weren't good things about them, they were just...difficult.

I started 2011 with a wealth of hope and ended it asleep. As they (yep, those same bastards) say hope is not a strategy and to seemingly prove that I ran out of hope early on. I'm not getting the milage out of hope that I used to. I think I've got a leaky head gasket and that my timing is off. 

Most damning, I suppose, is that I exited 2011 owing more apologies than you're welcomes. 

To those I owe apologies to, I'll let the Doobie Brothers speak for me...

Chorus

Who you see, this is who I am.

Please forgive me if I fall sometimes, 

Just an ordinary man.