Category Archives: esfuerzos inútiles

On yawning

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Just thinking about yawning makes me yawn. Have you ever yawned so hard that something snaps in your jaw and your eyes water? I once sneezed and yawned at the same time and sprained my face. A yawn is obviously a sign that you are sleepy or sleep deprived, but it is also a sign of boredom. During the sermon on Sunday morning, I will do my best to always stifle all yawns. I yawned one time and a fly flew into my mouth and down my throat. Sometimes a good yawn is all you really need to get the sleep factory really humming along. When I see someone else yawn, I want to yawn as well. Checking out someone else’s tonsils when they yawn is probably bad manners. Never kiss and yawn at the same time–you will be found out. You might drown if you yawn while swimming. One should cover one’s mouth while yawning, but we all know that we don’t. Coffee is not the solution for solving a bad yawning moment. Some people try to talk while they yawn and sound like an old Norwegian longshoremen–unintelligible mumbling. Writing this little essay has made me start yawning. Dogs yawn, but I don’t think cats do. Yawning is an early warning system for sleep deprivation. Really sleepy people yawn and stretch at the same time, creating a sort of super-yawn. Well, have you yawned yet?

On yawning

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Just thinking about yawning makes me yawn. Have you ever yawned so hard that something snaps in your jaw and your eyes water? I once sneezed and yawned at the same time and sprained my face. A yawn is obviously a sign that you are sleepy or sleep deprived, but it is also a sign of boredom. During the sermon on Sunday morning, I will do my best to always stifle all yawns. I yawned one time and a fly flew into my mouth and down my throat. Sometimes a good yawn is all you really need to get the sleep factory really humming along. When I see someone else yawn, I want to yawn as well. Checking out someone else’s tonsils when they yawn is probably bad manners. Never kiss and yawn at the same time–you will be found out. You might drown if you yawn while swimming. One should cover one’s mouth while yawning, but we all know that we don’t. Coffee is not the solution for solving a bad yawning moment. Some people try to talk while they yawn and sound like an old Norwegian longshoremen–unintelligible mumbling. Writing this little essay has made me start yawning. Dogs yawn, but I don’t think cats do. Yawning is an early warning system for sleep deprivation. Really sleepy people yawn and stretch at the same time, creating a sort of super-yawn. Well, have you yawned yet?

On washing the car

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A most worthless past-time has never been invented. I’ve seen the guys who spend every weekend washing their vehicles, waxing them, polishing up the chrome, making their cars shine. I get it–these vehicles are an extension of their egos. I’m not even going to talk about those people who pay to have their cars washed by others–disgusting. Nevertheless, cars go out into the world, cars get dirty, cars drive through every bit of crap and dirt and pollution that contaminates our environment; these things never vary. I haven’t washed my car in several months; it’s not a habit of mine, and every time it rains, the car just gets a little more dirty. Finally, the back end of my red car had turned gray, so it was time to go to the car wash. Washing a car is bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, no matter how often you do it, the car will still be dirty. Other than pride, wanting to show off, why would we possibly wash our cars? Yes, you do want to get the bird excrement off of the paint so the paint doesn’t start to flake off, but just regular dirt doesn’t have that much of an influence on the paint job. In fact, doesn’t the dirt protect the paint from further harm? Now my car is a nice, bright, candy-apple red, again. But I still can’t figure out what drove me to wash my car; it’s only going to get dirty again.

On washing the car

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A most worthless past-time has never been invented. I’ve seen the guys who spend every weekend washing their vehicles, waxing them, polishing up the chrome, making their cars shine. I get it–these vehicles are an extension of their egos. I’m not even going to talk about those people who pay to have their cars washed by others–disgusting. Nevertheless, cars go out into the world, cars get dirty, cars drive through every bit of crap and dirt and pollution that contaminates our environment; these things never vary. I haven’t washed my car in several months; it’s not a habit of mine, and every time it rains, the car just gets a little more dirty. Finally, the back end of my red car had turned gray, so it was time to go to the car wash. Washing a car is bit like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, no matter how often you do it, the car will still be dirty. Other than pride, wanting to show off, why would we possibly wash our cars? Yes, you do want to get the bird excrement off of the paint so the paint doesn’t start to flake off, but just regular dirt doesn’t have that much of an influence on the paint job. In fact, doesn’t the dirt protect the paint from further harm? Now my car is a nice, bright, candy-apple red, again. But I still can’t figure out what drove me to wash my car; it’s only going to get dirty again.

On loud commercials

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This is not about weird local commercials for flooring or odd used cars or sewage pumping. This is about how television stations raise the sound level of commercials, a move that should be illegal, but still plagues us all. Imagine, you are watching a favorite television show at a normal level of sound. A commercial for pick-up trucks cut in at the same decible level as an old 747, knocking you off of the sofa, leaving you both startled and deaf. I know that “they”, the advertisers have been doing this for decades, but I still hate it. I end up diving for the remote control, spilling my potato chips and soda, in order to hit the mute button. I get it–they want me to pay attention, but really, the exact opposite happens: I take note of the offending product and vow to never, ever to buy it, no matter what it is. Once I get the screen muted, many commercials are actually rather entertaining, especially when you can’t really tell what is being advertised. Since the sound if off, you can’t hear either the music, the sound track or the voice-over, so many times it’s not easy to tell what is being sold at any given moment, especially if they need to use euphemisms to describe the product. I particularly hate the ads for all sanitary products, diapers, catheters and the like. Food ads late at night are despicable. All truck ads are blatantly loud and obnoxious. Some insurance ads, especially if the character is dressed in white, are creepy and sketchy, which is not exactly the image an insurance company wants to put forward. Honestly, if they didn’t turn up the sound during the ads, I might actually listen and watch. In the meantime, I will turn off the sound, defeating the entire purpose of the commercials, and make up my soundtrack and voice-over, all the while maintaining my list of annoying products that I will never use.

On loud commercials

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This is not about weird local commercials for flooring or odd used cars or sewage pumping. This is about how television stations raise the sound level of commercials, a move that should be illegal, but still plagues us all. Imagine, you are watching a favorite television show at a normal level of sound. A commercial for pick-up trucks cut in at the same decible level as an old 747, knocking you off of the sofa, leaving you both startled and deaf. I know that “they”, the advertisers have been doing this for decades, but I still hate it. I end up diving for the remote control, spilling my potato chips and soda, in order to hit the mute button. I get it–they want me to pay attention, but really, the exact opposite happens: I take note of the offending product and vow to never, ever to buy it, no matter what it is. Once I get the screen muted, many commercials are actually rather entertaining, especially when you can’t really tell what is being advertised. Since the sound if off, you can’t hear either the music, the sound track or the voice-over, so many times it’s not easy to tell what is being sold at any given moment, especially if they need to use euphemisms to describe the product. I particularly hate the ads for all sanitary products, diapers, catheters and the like. Food ads late at night are despicable. All truck ads are blatantly loud and obnoxious. Some insurance ads, especially if the character is dressed in white, are creepy and sketchy, which is not exactly the image an insurance company wants to put forward. Honestly, if they didn’t turn up the sound during the ads, I might actually listen and watch. In the meantime, I will turn off the sound, defeating the entire purpose of the commercials, and make up my soundtrack and voice-over, all the while maintaining my list of annoying products that I will never use.

On being stuck

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Sand, mud, snow, ice, is there a worse feeling than being stuck in some substance and not being able to move? Certainly, you might be doing a math problem, or a crossword, or deciphering a code, or trying to solve a murder mystery, and you might be stuck, but that kind of stuck is nothing compared to the immobility of spinning wheels and grinding gears. Whoever invented the standard differential was not thinking of driving under bad conditions. I’ve been stuck on ice with two inches of snow, and my vehicle could not move on its own. I had to be towed out of the tiny little snowbank. Is there anything sadder than seeing the rear wheels up to their axles in mud and water? There is no condition worse than stuck, whether it is your car, your brain, your zipper, or your foot, you are nigh on helpless when something is stuck. Has your transmission ever gotten stuck in neutral and although the engine will run just fine, the car does not move an inch? I don’t even want to imagine the frustration caused by a stuck zipper that you can’t get either down or up, depending on what you want to do. If you live in an old house, it is pretty common to have a stuck window that you can’t open, or a door that’s stuck because of the humidity. A nut on an old rusty bolt that won’t turn, a person trying to get into a house by going through the dog’s door, a fish-bone in your throat, an eighties pop song that keeps running endlessly through your head, a Lego in a child’s nose or ear are some things that can get stuck. I am totally not going to list all of the things that people, at one time or another, have gotten stuck in their bodies, I’m trying to keep this family oriented after all. Has anyone ever been stuck in the middle with you? Have you ever been stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way out? How many people do you know that are stuck on themselves? Perhaps being stuck somewhere is not all bad. I was stuck in London for three days, so I went and did all the touristy things that tourists do, and I had a lot of fun. I have been stuck on airplanes, which isn’t much fun unless you have a good book, and glass of something or other to drink, and a comfortable seat, in which case I don’t care if I’m stuck, really. In the end, however, being stuck is about immobility, not moving either forward or back, not evolving in any way, caught in retrenched routine, unmovable mental stasis where change cannot enter. When your mind is stuck on only one idea, on only one way of doing or thinking about an idea or problem, you cannot move forward to any kind of solution. If you are stuck, you know that the moment has arrived for just stepping back, putting down the mouse, getting up from the chair, moving away from the screen, getting out of the office, pouring a fresh cup of coffee, and letting the problem go for a few minutes. When I have been stuck and unable to see the solution, that very sensation of frustration and failure contributes geometrically to making the stuck problem worse, whether you are trying to dislodge a stuck pea from the nose of a two-year-old or a two-ton Ford Torino from a fresh snowbank, the solution will only occur if you can get your mind un-stuck first. Stuck is both a physically reality and a mental conundrum, but all solutions to the state of being stuck will only arise when the mind has its own limited slip differential that allows both wheels to spin.

On being stuck

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Sand, mud, snow, ice, is there a worse feeling than being stuck in some substance and not being able to move? Certainly, you might be doing a math problem, or a crossword, or deciphering a code, or trying to solve a murder mystery, and you might be stuck, but that kind of stuck is nothing compared to the immobility of spinning wheels and grinding gears. Whoever invented the standard differential was not thinking of driving under bad conditions. I’ve been stuck on ice with two inches of snow, and my vehicle could not move on its own. I had to be towed out of the tiny little snowbank. Is there anything sadder than seeing the rear wheels up to their axles in mud and water? There is no condition worse than stuck, whether it is your car, your brain, your zipper, or your foot, you are nigh on helpless when something is stuck. Has your transmission ever gotten stuck in neutral and although the engine will run just fine, the car does not move an inch? I don’t even want to imagine the frustration caused by a stuck zipper that you can’t get either down or up, depending on what you want to do. If you live in an old house, it is pretty common to have a stuck window that you can’t open, or a door that’s stuck because of the humidity. A nut on an old rusty bolt that won’t turn, a person trying to get into a house by going through the dog’s door, a fish-bone in your throat, an eighties pop song that keeps running endlessly through your head, a Lego in a child’s nose or ear are some things that can get stuck. I am totally not going to list all of the things that people, at one time or another, have gotten stuck in their bodies, I’m trying to keep this family oriented after all. Has anyone ever been stuck in the middle with you? Have you ever been stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way out? How many people do you know that are stuck on themselves? Perhaps being stuck somewhere is not all bad. I was stuck in London for three days, so I went and did all the touristy things that tourists do, and I had a lot of fun. I have been stuck on airplanes, which isn’t much fun unless you have a good book, and glass of something or other to drink, and a comfortable seat, in which case I don’t care if I’m stuck, really. In the end, however, being stuck is about immobility, not moving either forward or back, not evolving in any way, caught in retrenched routine, unmovable mental stasis where change cannot enter. When your mind is stuck on only one idea, on only one way of doing or thinking about an idea or problem, you cannot move forward to any kind of solution. If you are stuck, you know that the moment has arrived for just stepping back, putting down the mouse, getting up from the chair, moving away from the screen, getting out of the office, pouring a fresh cup of coffee, and letting the problem go for a few minutes. When I have been stuck and unable to see the solution, that very sensation of frustration and failure contributes geometrically to making the stuck problem worse, whether you are trying to dislodge a stuck pea from the nose of a two-year-old or a two-ton Ford Torino from a fresh snowbank, the solution will only occur if you can get your mind un-stuck first. Stuck is both a physically reality and a mental conundrum, but all solutions to the state of being stuck will only arise when the mind has its own limited slip differential that allows both wheels to spin.

On time travel, universe ending paradoxes, and alternate time lines

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You may consider a note about time travel as frivolous, vulgar, or even foolish, but don’t kid yourself: if you could go back to your fourteen-year-old self with a bunch of hard-earned information about your future, you would. I have always said that time travel is not only improbable, it is impossible. The proof, however, is not really proof because you cannot prove a negative: just because we don’t think we have ever met a time-traveler, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We are obsessed with tales and stories of time-travel mostly due to our rampant nostalgia for the past and a yearning to correct all of the mistakes we know we made along the way. We know no one has ever come back from the future, nor has anyone ever returned to the past to alter the past. Only lucky people have ever won the lottery, but again, as far as we know–maybe the lottery winners were time travelers who were just pretending to be lucky when they knew the winning numbers all along. If someone were to travel to the past and change some major historical event–the sinking of Titanic, for example, and change the timeline–we would never know it, now, would we? Would a time traveler suffer a major trauma if they ran into their younger selves? Or would it be, simply, creepy? If I were a time traveler, I would go back to a time in American history, say the period between 1946 and 1963, get myself a Vermont farmhouse, and lead a quiet, undisturbed life, far from the noise of the maddening crowd. Or maybe the late 1890’s? I would never go back to the sixties or seventies, but the late seventies and early eighties, which were very anti-aesthetic, were an awful lot of fun. Sherman and Mr. Peabody taught me a very important lesson with their “Wayback” machine: the past is a distant country that we not only don’t understand, we idealize it all out of proportion. The past must be a closed book, or our daily reality would be an unpredictable chaos. If a coffee cup falls on the floor, the coffee spills, and the cup breaks. Hypothetically, the equations governing that particular accident may run both backwards and forwards, but the actual reality of the broken coffee cup is other: only glue will put it back together–it stays broken for all eternity. The obsession with time travel, either into the future or into the past, poses extreme ethical and moral dilemmas for the traveler. Changing the already established events of the past would alter the world in devastating ways, which is always the message of time-traveling movies, novels, and stories. If the time traveler accidentally killed a great-grandparent, would they instantly disappear? Or would they never have existed at all, unable to go back and kill that grandparent because they never existed at all? One could go crazy trying to understand the universe ending paradox of an impossible time loop. Yet, according to the equations both the past, present, and future all exist at once, indistinguishable from one another, but it seems that we can only access the present at any given moment. The impossibility of time travel is perhaps what makes it so much fun, so intriguing, such a conundrum. How I would love to tell my twelve-year-old self that everything will turn out fine and a bunch of other stuff about life that it took me forever to figure out.

On time travel, universe ending paradoxes, and alternate time lines

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You may consider a note about time travel as frivolous, vulgar, or even foolish, but don’t kid yourself: if you could go back to your fourteen-year-old self with a bunch of hard-earned information about your future, you would. I have always said that time travel is not only improbable, it is impossible. The proof, however, is not really proof because you cannot prove a negative: just because we don’t think we have ever met a time-traveler, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there. We are obsessed with tales and stories of time-travel mostly due to our rampant nostalgia for the past and a yearning to correct all of the mistakes we know we made along the way. We know no one has ever come back from the future, nor has anyone ever returned to the past to alter the past. Only lucky people have ever won the lottery, but again, as far as we know–maybe the lottery winners were time travelers who were just pretending to be lucky when they knew the winning numbers all along. If someone were to travel to the past and change some major historical event–the sinking of Titanic, for example, and change the timeline–we would never know it, now, would we? Would a time traveler suffer a major trauma if they ran into their younger selves? Or would it be, simply, creepy? If I were a time traveler, I would go back to a time in American history, say the period between 1946 and 1963, get myself a Vermont farmhouse, and lead a quiet, undisturbed life, far from the noise of the maddening crowd. Or maybe the late 1890’s? I would never go back to the sixties or seventies, but the late seventies and early eighties, which were very anti-aesthetic, were an awful lot of fun. Sherman and Mr. Peabody taught me a very important lesson with their “Wayback” machine: the past is a distant country that we not only don’t understand, we idealize it all out of proportion. The past must be a closed book, or our daily reality would be an unpredictable chaos. If a coffee cup falls on the floor, the coffee spills, and the cup breaks. Hypothetically, the equations governing that particular accident may run both backwards and forwards, but the actual reality of the broken coffee cup is other: only glue will put it back together–it stays broken for all eternity. The obsession with time travel, either into the future or into the past, poses extreme ethical and moral dilemmas for the traveler. Changing the already established events of the past would alter the world in devastating ways, which is always the message of time-traveling movies, novels, and stories. If the time traveler accidentally killed a great-grandparent, would they instantly disappear? Or would they never have existed at all, unable to go back and kill that grandparent because they never existed at all? One could go crazy trying to understand the universe ending paradox of an impossible time loop. Yet, according to the equations both the past, present, and future all exist at once, indistinguishable from one another, but it seems that we can only access the present at any given moment. The impossibility of time travel is perhaps what makes it so much fun, so intriguing, such a conundrum. How I would love to tell my twelve-year-old self that everything will turn out fine and a bunch of other stuff about life that it took me forever to figure out.