Category Archives: experience

On homecoming

Posted on by

Tonight, the St. Peter Saints will play the Luverne Cardinals at 7 p.m. in St. Peter. St. Peter is celebrating its homecoming week and football game tonight, which means parades, homecoming queens and kings, getting out of class early, and an exciting football game to which alumni are invited once a year. Nostalgia is fun, but it doesn’t pay the mortgage. I have always thought that Thomas Wolfe was correct when he said you can’t go back home. Personally, I haven’t really lived in my hometown for over thirty years, so although I recognize the last names, a couple of generations of children have gone through the high school. I have more in common with the football players’ and cheerleaders’ grandparents than I do their parents. As the decades have dropped by, my hometown has changed a bit, but it has also stayed the same. Living in the past is a dead end. Homecoming is more fun for the high school kids than it is for the old alumni, and that is the way it should be. Kick-off is scheduled in about an hour, and the band will play, the cheerleaders will jump and scream, the young men will strap on their gear, and the students will file into the stadium to cheer on their team as they always have. Perhaps homecoming is there to remind us all that we have grown up, Peter Pan. I will not be there, just as I have never been there for the past thirty-six years. It’s always time to move on.

On homecoming

Posted on by

Tonight, the St. Peter Saints will play the Luverne Cardinals at 7 p.m. in St. Peter. St. Peter is celebrating its homecoming week and football game tonight, which means parades, homecoming queens and kings, getting out of class early, and an exciting football game to which alumni are invited once a year. Nostalgia is fun, but it doesn’t pay the mortgage. I have always thought that Thomas Wolfe was correct when he said you can’t go back home. Personally, I haven’t really lived in my hometown for over thirty years, so although I recognize the last names, a couple of generations of children have gone through the high school. I have more in common with the football players’ and cheerleaders’ grandparents than I do their parents. As the decades have dropped by, my hometown has changed a bit, but it has also stayed the same. Living in the past is a dead end. Homecoming is more fun for the high school kids than it is for the old alumni, and that is the way it should be. Kick-off is scheduled in about an hour, and the band will play, the cheerleaders will jump and scream, the young men will strap on their gear, and the students will file into the stadium to cheer on their team as they always have. Perhaps homecoming is there to remind us all that we have grown up, Peter Pan. I will not be there, just as I have never been there for the past thirty-six years. It’s always time to move on.

On being stuck

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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 morning

Posted on by

Normally, if anything is indeed “normal,” my mornings are about rushing around, showering, slurping a bit of coffee, the martyrdom of shaving, toast (I like toast), and joining the crazy rush on the highways that lead to work. Sometimes I buy gas to break up the routine, but usually morning is pretty routine and crazy stuff. This morning, Saturday, was not about any of that. I am now enjoying my third cup of coffee, I’ve enjoyed home-made pancakes with the family, I’ve stalked around on facebook a bit, looking at new baby pictures, a wounded (he’s okay) cat and the fleur-de-lis on the helmets of my hometown football team. The town of St. Peter, Minnesota was founded by French Bourbons in the eighteenth century, ergo their colors are blue and white and their emblem is the fleur-de-lis. Funny how we never really escape our pasts no matter how hard we try. This morning, a Saturday morning, is both relaxing and contemplative because I don’t have to chase off to be somewhere on time. I often wonder about how much damage we do to ourselves by trying to meet deadlines, getting to work “on-time,” or by just rushing off in a general and haphazard fashion. Nothing about a Monday through Friday morning is either relaxing or positive. Perpetually late, myself, sometimes I wonder if I was born five minutes late and I’ve never been able to make up that time. Most mornings remind me of a perpetual chase for some totally undefined goal or fuzzy mirages, amorphous shapes of desire and envy. When I wake up I am not in any kind of shape to do anything important, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Sometimes people go to bed late, or they sleep poorly, have nightmares, toss and turn. Getting up to an alarm is a form of legal torture that, after a number of years or decades, leaves an indelible scar–you end up a retired person who can’t sleep anymore after six a.m. So, ironically, when you have mornings on which you don’t have to get up, you can’t sleep anyway. The chaotic mornings of contemporary life cannot be a healthy way of starting the day. Sleep experts keep reminding us all that most people don’t ever get enough sleep and are permanently sleep-deprived, short-tempered, cranky, and irked. Road rage cannot be far behind. Not this morning, however. With a certain amount of glee, I turned off the alarm last night as I went to bed, and got up this morning when I felt like it. The coffee tastes better if you can sip it. The anxiety of facing crazy commuter morning traffic is gone, and I can unload the dishwasher and clean up the kitchen in peace. All of the negativity of a normal, work-a-day, morning is just not there. No kids to wake up and chase off to school, no stop and go traffic jam to deal with at the school, no speeders trying desperately to make it to work on time because they got up late. Overdosing your brain on locally produced cortisol only leads to more stress, which is bad for your whole body, leaving you feeling empty and hungover, cranky. Perhaps the lesson of Saturday morning is bigger and broader than it initially seems: maybe all mornings should be a bit more like Saturday and a lot less like Monday.

On morning

Posted on by

Normally, if anything is indeed “normal,” my mornings are about rushing around, showering, slurping a bit of coffee, the martyrdom of shaving, toast (I like toast), and joining the crazy rush on the highways that lead to work. Sometimes I buy gas to break up the routine, but usually morning is pretty routine and crazy stuff. This morning, Saturday, was not about any of that. I am now enjoying my third cup of coffee, I’ve enjoyed home-made pancakes with the family, I’ve stalked around on facebook a bit, looking at new baby pictures, a wounded (he’s okay) cat and the fleur-de-lis on the helmets of my hometown football team. The town of St. Peter, Minnesota was founded by French Bourbons in the eighteenth century, ergo their colors are blue and white and their emblem is the fleur-de-lis. Funny how we never really escape our pasts no matter how hard we try. This morning, a Saturday morning, is both relaxing and contemplative because I don’t have to chase off to be somewhere on time. I often wonder about how much damage we do to ourselves by trying to meet deadlines, getting to work “on-time,” or by just rushing off in a general and haphazard fashion. Nothing about a Monday through Friday morning is either relaxing or positive. Perpetually late, myself, sometimes I wonder if I was born five minutes late and I’ve never been able to make up that time. Most mornings remind me of a perpetual chase for some totally undefined goal or fuzzy mirages, amorphous shapes of desire and envy. When I wake up I am not in any kind of shape to do anything important, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Sometimes people go to bed late, or they sleep poorly, have nightmares, toss and turn. Getting up to an alarm is a form of legal torture that, after a number of years or decades, leaves an indelible scar–you end up a retired person who can’t sleep anymore after six a.m. So, ironically, when you have mornings on which you don’t have to get up, you can’t sleep anyway. The chaotic mornings of contemporary life cannot be a healthy way of starting the day. Sleep experts keep reminding us all that most people don’t ever get enough sleep and are permanently sleep-deprived, short-tempered, cranky, and irked. Road rage cannot be far behind. Not this morning, however. With a certain amount of glee, I turned off the alarm last night as I went to bed, and got up this morning when I felt like it. The coffee tastes better if you can sip it. The anxiety of facing crazy commuter morning traffic is gone, and I can unload the dishwasher and clean up the kitchen in peace. All of the negativity of a normal, work-a-day, morning is just not there. No kids to wake up and chase off to school, no stop and go traffic jam to deal with at the school, no speeders trying desperately to make it to work on time because they got up late. Overdosing your brain on locally produced cortisol only leads to more stress, which is bad for your whole body, leaving you feeling empty and hungover, cranky. Perhaps the lesson of Saturday morning is bigger and broader than it initially seems: maybe all mornings should be a bit more like Saturday and a lot less like Monday.

On learning English

Posted on by

Anyone who learns English as a second language has my admiration. I’ve been trying to learn English as a first language for over fifty years to great or lesser degrees of success or failure, and I have to admit, English is one really tough nut to crack. I’ve studied verbs and nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, clauses, gerunds, pronouns, relative pronouns, subject pronouns, object pronouns, interjections, slang, and a never ending list of strange grammar points, none of which are consistent, coherent, or logical. Even if the pronunciation weren’t a nightmare, or that all the short vowels weren’t the same, or the silent letters, or all the bizarre idiomatic expressions with prepositions and verbs, or the lack of a true subjunctive, or our inconsistent orthography, or our strange relationship to punctuation, it would still be hard. Don’t even get me started with the helping verb “do” or whatever the word “would” really means because I have no idea. As a bilingual person (I sorta speak a little Spanish–Hablo un pequeño español), I know how hard it is to learn another language that you were not born with. I’ve studied English for years, and it is still a complete mystery to me. Oh sure, I’ve given up trying to make sense of this mess, which is a major load off of my shoulders because trying to understand English is only a little less terrible than trying to learn it as a second language. Perhaps the only thing crazier than English syntax is, well, wait, maybe there is nothing crazier than English syntax. What drives second language learners out of the minds are all of the words that sound to them just about the same, and if that isn’t enough, there are about thirty different brands of English which pronounce all of those similar words just a little bit differently, but not differently enough to be another language, or even another dialect, just differently enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to learn English as a second language. And it’s the little words, the in’s and on’s, the about’s and the over’s which can change the meaning of any simple sentence in a radicle way–thinking “over” something is not the same as thinking “about” something. The combinations of verbs and prepositions is almost infinite as are their different meanings. Let’s not even discuss the passive voice in English. Yet English seems to be everywhere and is a requirement for so many kinds of jobs and occupations, so a lot of people have to learn it. Perhaps the hardest thing to learn in English are the idiomatic expressions–short, sweet, and have little or nothing to do with the actual words involved, so knowing the meaning of the words is irrelevant for understanding the meaning of the entire phrase. If you tell someone, “You’re fired,” they should have no actual idea that they are out of a job. What is so maddening, nee, insane about English are all of the small subtleties that contribute to meaning. The pronunciation is impossible, the syntax twisted, the semantics insane, so why would anyone want to learn English? Well, I can think of lots of reasons, but there can only really be one reason that has any value–because they want to. In the meantime, sign up for your English classes–in a college or university, on-line, maybe a pre-packaged course you do on your computer? Sandstone?

On learning English

Posted on by

Anyone who learns English as a second language has my admiration. I’ve been trying to learn English as a first language for over fifty years to great or lesser degrees of success or failure, and I have to admit, English is one really tough nut to crack. I’ve studied verbs and nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, clauses, gerunds, pronouns, relative pronouns, subject pronouns, object pronouns, interjections, slang, and a never ending list of strange grammar points, none of which are consistent, coherent, or logical. Even if the pronunciation weren’t a nightmare, or that all the short vowels weren’t the same, or the silent letters, or all the bizarre idiomatic expressions with prepositions and verbs, or the lack of a true subjunctive, or our inconsistent orthography, or our strange relationship to punctuation, it would still be hard. Don’t even get me started with the helping verb “do” or whatever the word “would” really means because I have no idea. As a bilingual person (I sorta speak a little Spanish–Hablo un pequeño español), I know how hard it is to learn another language that you were not born with. I’ve studied English for years, and it is still a complete mystery to me. Oh sure, I’ve given up trying to make sense of this mess, which is a major load off of my shoulders because trying to understand English is only a little less terrible than trying to learn it as a second language. Perhaps the only thing crazier than English syntax is, well, wait, maybe there is nothing crazier than English syntax. What drives second language learners out of the minds are all of the words that sound to them just about the same, and if that isn’t enough, there are about thirty different brands of English which pronounce all of those similar words just a little bit differently, but not differently enough to be another language, or even another dialect, just differently enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to learn English as a second language. And it’s the little words, the in’s and on’s, the about’s and the over’s which can change the meaning of any simple sentence in a radicle way–thinking “over” something is not the same as thinking “about” something. The combinations of verbs and prepositions is almost infinite as are their different meanings. Let’s not even discuss the passive voice in English. Yet English seems to be everywhere and is a requirement for so many kinds of jobs and occupations, so a lot of people have to learn it. Perhaps the hardest thing to learn in English are the idiomatic expressions–short, sweet, and have little or nothing to do with the actual words involved, so knowing the meaning of the words is irrelevant for understanding the meaning of the entire phrase. If you tell someone, “You’re fired,” they should have no actual idea that they are out of a job. What is so maddening, nee, insane about English are all of the small subtleties that contribute to meaning. The pronunciation is impossible, the syntax twisted, the semantics insane, so why would anyone want to learn English? Well, I can think of lots of reasons, but there can only really be one reason that has any value–because they want to. In the meantime, sign up for your English classes–in a college or university, on-line, maybe a pre-packaged course you do on your computer? Sandstone?