On ties

I have a passel of ties, but I hate wearing them–all that rigmarole with the fancy knot. Most guys don’t know how to tie the knot, so they do a simple slip-knot, and it always looks like hash. Crooked, I mean. Sort destroys the whole point of the tie if you can’t tie it properly. They are adjustable, you know, according to my friend, Sha. As far as a totally useless piece of clothing goes, the tie is the most useless. Except if you want to keep gravy off of your shirt, the tie has no known use or value. Some guys with fat necks use ties as a cover for not buttoning that top button, but all that means is that they need to buy bigger shirts or lose a little weight. Some might say that a tie adds elegance of color and design to a man’s suit, but that is just style and caprice, meaningless, in other words. So men collect ties, always looking for that perfect shade of red or that one odd shade of gray that will look good with their favorite shirt. Many ties are just flat out ugly. In fact, most ties are flat out ugly. Murphy’s Law of ties says that no matter how you place your napkin, you will stain your favorite tie with bacon grease no matter what. Polyester ties are the worst of the worst. Pink ties? I think paisley is coming back, so hang in there paisley lovers. Murphy’s second law is that you will forget your tie for that one important interview. Never run a drill press with a tie on. Men will never throw away a tie no matter how out of style it might be or how blood-stained it might be. One should never dab one’s mouth with your tie after slobbering on yourself.

On ties

I have a passel of ties, but I hate wearing them–all that rigmarole with the fancy knot. Most guys don’t know how to tie the knot, so they do a simple slip-knot, and it always looks like hash. Crooked, I mean. Sort destroys the whole point of the tie if you can’t tie it properly. They are adjustable, you know, according to my friend, Sha. As far as a totally useless piece of clothing goes, the tie is the most useless. Except if you want to keep gravy off of your shirt, the tie has no known use or value. Some guys with fat necks use ties as a cover for not buttoning that top button, but all that means is that they need to buy bigger shirts or lose a little weight. Some might say that a tie adds elegance of color and design to a man’s suit, but that is just style and caprice, meaningless, in other words. So men collect ties, always looking for that perfect shade of red or that one odd shade of gray that will look good with their favorite shirt. Many ties are just flat out ugly. In fact, most ties are flat out ugly. Murphy’s Law of ties says that no matter how you place your napkin, you will stain your favorite tie with bacon grease no matter what. Polyester ties are the worst of the worst. Pink ties? I think paisley is coming back, so hang in there paisley lovers. Murphy’s second law is that you will forget your tie for that one important interview. Never run a drill press with a tie on. Men will never throw away a tie no matter how out of style it might be or how blood-stained it might be. One should never dab one’s mouth with your tie after slobbering on yourself.

On finding that which is lost

I hate losing things. I am forgetful and absentminded, so from time to time, my things go missing. I’ve lost, at various times, keys, wallets, shoes, jackets, bills, letters, hats, gloves, watches, pants (don’t ask), money, check book, eye glasses, sun glasses, umbrellas, Ipod, socks, candy, pens, maps, my way. You can imagine, then, that I am also an expert in finding lost things since I have so much practice in this art. I am an expert in tracking a lost item through my house, into my car, across town, past my office, and into the lost-and-found in the business school or wherever it might end up. I have found things that I never knew were lost in the first place. When looking for that which is lost, one must always imagine that the object is in a place that you never imagined it could occupy–that’s why it’s lost. There is a certain ironic irrationality to lost items which makes them doubly hard to find—you would never expect them to hide in the refrigerator, or in the sofa, or behind the stove, under the recycling, or in the dirty clothes hamper. I especially hate it when lost things find their way into random pocket on jackets that have not been out of the closet in years. Particularly painful are documents which you have accidentally thrown away, such as passports, birth certificates. The state of being lost is always accompanied by the emotion of loss. When an object goes missing–an engagement ring, for example–the involved parties immediately go into panic mode which is quickly replaced by a sense of loss and mourning and sadness. Although possessions may be replaced, we often develop an emotional attachment to those objects which accompany us on a daily basis–keys, wallet, glasses, phone, rings–even though that attachment is irrational and unfounded. The objects we carry will never have any feelings for us, and when we finally abandon them, they will never know that we are gone. Our objects are blind and dumb, silent sentinels that watch over our daily comings and goings. Yet we grieve when they go missing, but not just because it is totally inconvenient, but because we have been careless with our thing and let them out of our care. Looking for lost objects is painful, full of anxiety, angst-ridden, depressing, time consuming, and, often, fruitless. Who bothers to pick up a lost item and return it to the lost-and-found? Sometimes, however, my faith in human nature is restored by a good Samaritan who makes the effort to retrieve a lost object and return it to the owner, which is what I do when I find a lost ID or book or object which might be identified. When I can’t tell to whom it belongs, I will put the object in the lost-and-found, hoping that the owner will back track over their steps and return to the scene of the tragedy. Once, someone gave me a lost jacket, insisting that it was mine. Since I couldn’t find the owner, and no one stepped up to claim it, I put it in the closet–didn’t want to disappoint the good Samaritan that returned a lost object to me. When you do find that which is lost, you are overwhelmed by an enormous sense of relief. You might even cry. There are times, however, when the lost stays lost and you have to replace it. You kick yourself because of your carelessness, you second guess your actions, you wonder how you could have been so klutzy as to lose such an important thing–your keys, wallet, phone, watch, shoes, pants (don’t ask). I once lost a hat in the middle of a blizzard because I didn’t tie my chin strap and the wind stole my hat. Try as I might, though, I am always fighting the forces of carelessness, trying to conserve by stuff.

On finding that which is lost

I hate losing things. I am forgetful and absentminded, so from time to time, my things go missing. I’ve lost, at various times, keys, wallets, shoes, jackets, bills, letters, hats, gloves, watches, pants (don’t ask), money, check book, eye glasses, sun glasses, umbrellas, Ipod, socks, candy, pens, maps, my way. You can imagine, then, that I am also an expert in finding lost things since I have so much practice in this art. I am an expert in tracking a lost item through my house, into my car, across town, past my office, and into the lost-and-found in the business school or wherever it might end up. I have found things that I never knew were lost in the first place. When looking for that which is lost, one must always imagine that the object is in a place that you never imagined it could occupy–that’s why it’s lost. There is a certain ironic irrationality to lost items which makes them doubly hard to find—you would never expect them to hide in the refrigerator, or in the sofa, or behind the stove, under the recycling, or in the dirty clothes hamper. I especially hate it when lost things find their way into random pocket on jackets that have not been out of the closet in years. Particularly painful are documents which you have accidentally thrown away, such as passports, birth certificates. The state of being lost is always accompanied by the emotion of loss. When an object goes missing–an engagement ring, for example–the involved parties immediately go into panic mode which is quickly replaced by a sense of loss and mourning and sadness. Although possessions may be replaced, we often develop an emotional attachment to those objects which accompany us on a daily basis–keys, wallet, glasses, phone, rings–even though that attachment is irrational and unfounded. The objects we carry will never have any feelings for us, and when we finally abandon them, they will never know that we are gone. Our objects are blind and dumb, silent sentinels that watch over our daily comings and goings. Yet we grieve when they go missing, but not just because it is totally inconvenient, but because we have been careless with our thing and let them out of our care. Looking for lost objects is painful, full of anxiety, angst-ridden, depressing, time consuming, and, often, fruitless. Who bothers to pick up a lost item and return it to the lost-and-found? Sometimes, however, my faith in human nature is restored by a good Samaritan who makes the effort to retrieve a lost object and return it to the owner, which is what I do when I find a lost ID or book or object which might be identified. When I can’t tell to whom it belongs, I will put the object in the lost-and-found, hoping that the owner will back track over their steps and return to the scene of the tragedy. Once, someone gave me a lost jacket, insisting that it was mine. Since I couldn’t find the owner, and no one stepped up to claim it, I put it in the closet–didn’t want to disappoint the good Samaritan that returned a lost object to me. When you do find that which is lost, you are overwhelmed by an enormous sense of relief. You might even cry. There are times, however, when the lost stays lost and you have to replace it. You kick yourself because of your carelessness, you second guess your actions, you wonder how you could have been so klutzy as to lose such an important thing–your keys, wallet, phone, watch, shoes, pants (don’t ask). I once lost a hat in the middle of a blizzard because I didn’t tie my chin strap and the wind stole my hat. Try as I might, though, I am always fighting the forces of carelessness, trying to conserve by stuff.

On dead batteries

Is this the most annoying thing to have to do on a regular basis? Our lives are filled with electronic gadgets that need batteries: flashlights, remote controls, garage door openers, watches, security systems, cars, smoke alarms, hearing aids, cameras. What is annoying about having a dead battery is pretty obvious: the car won’t start, the flashlight is dead, the garage won’t open. Murphy’s Law of Dead Batteries suggests that when a dead battery event occurs, you will not have a backup at your location. A corollary of that axiom suggests that the event will occur when it is totally inconvenient and will cause the most trouble. You will, for example, have a dead battery in your flashlight when you get a flat tire at midnight on a lonely country road on a night with a new moon–dead blackness. Your garage door opener will go dead on a very rainy day when you are wearing a new suit and new shoes. You may never know that your smoke alarm battery is dead. You will find out that the backup battery in your alarm clock is dead that day when the power fails and you oversleep for work. When the remote control fails because of a dead battery, you are trying to watch two things on two different channels at the same time. Since you don’t have replacements at home, you have to get in the car and go get some, but your car won’t start because the battery is dead. After you appeal to your neighbor to give you a ride, you find out that the store is fresh out of the batteries you need and won’t have any new ones until next Tuesday. You check your watch to find that the sweep second hand has stopped moving and is no longer ticking. They are out of those watch batteries as well. You ask when they might get those again, but the old guy helping you can’t hear because the battery in his hearing aid has just quit on him. So you do finally get a new battery for your car, but the fittings on the battery are metric and your tools are standard American. You put two new double AA’s in the remote only to find that the cable is experiencing a temporary outage, and you can see nothing but snow. You call your mother to complain, but the battery in your cell phone is dead, so you plug it in and charge it. Your car with the dead battery sits in the driveway, motionless, in front of the closed garage door. The smoke alarm chirps a weary warning that it’s battery is about to die as well. You rummage through a drawer filled with dead batteries, a cemetery of unfinished projects, hoping to find a good one you might have overlooked. Your flashlight sits on the counter, waiting for you to re-install its energy system, but you are out of D cells. You drop two old batteries into the flashlight, and a pale yellow light shines in your hand.

On dead batteries

Is this the most annoying thing to have to do on a regular basis? Our lives are filled with electronic gadgets that need batteries: flashlights, remote controls, garage door openers, watches, security systems, cars, smoke alarms, hearing aids, cameras. What is annoying about having a dead battery is pretty obvious: the car won’t start, the flashlight is dead, the garage won’t open. Murphy’s Law of Dead Batteries suggests that when a dead battery event occurs, you will not have a backup at your location. A corollary of that axiom suggests that the event will occur when it is totally inconvenient and will cause the most trouble. You will, for example, have a dead battery in your flashlight when you get a flat tire at midnight on a lonely country road on a night with a new moon–dead blackness. Your garage door opener will go dead on a very rainy day when you are wearing a new suit and new shoes. You may never know that your smoke alarm battery is dead. You will find out that the backup battery in your alarm clock is dead that day when the power fails and you oversleep for work. When the remote control fails because of a dead battery, you are trying to watch two things on two different channels at the same time. Since you don’t have replacements at home, you have to get in the car and go get some, but your car won’t start because the battery is dead. After you appeal to your neighbor to give you a ride, you find out that the store is fresh out of the batteries you need and won’t have any new ones until next Tuesday. You check your watch to find that the sweep second hand has stopped moving and is no longer ticking. They are out of those watch batteries as well. You ask when they might get those again, but the old guy helping you can’t hear because the battery in his hearing aid has just quit on him. So you do finally get a new battery for your car, but the fittings on the battery are metric and your tools are standard American. You put two new double AA’s in the remote only to find that the cable is experiencing a temporary outage, and you can see nothing but snow. You call your mother to complain, but the battery in your cell phone is dead, so you plug it in and charge it. Your car with the dead battery sits in the driveway, motionless, in front of the closed garage door. The smoke alarm chirps a weary warning that it’s battery is about to die as well. You rummage through a drawer filled with dead batteries, a cemetery of unfinished projects, hoping to find a good one you might have overlooked. Your flashlight sits on the counter, waiting for you to re-install its energy system, but you are out of D cells. You drop two old batteries into the flashlight, and a pale yellow light shines in your hand.

On hats

You can tell a lot about a person by the hat they (don’t) wear. I’m not talking about the silly bit hats that the English ladies wear to their formal horse races, nor am I talking about actors in gangster films with their standard gangster hats. Or am I? A lot of people wear hats to protect their heads–fire fighters, race car drivers, cyclists, astronauts, football players, construction workers, but some wear hats to identify who they are–baseball players, policemen, mountain climbers, stalkers, nuns, graduates, professors. Lots of guys in college wear hats, but if it’s not to cover up a bad hair day (no shower), I have no idea why they do it. I wear hats to keep the sun off of my head. I have a variety of caps and hats that protect the delicate skin of my skull. Skin cancer is such an ugly thing. As I keep the sun off of my pate, I also stay cooler. The sun in Texas and in Spain is very, very hot, and often a hat is the difference between making it from the office to the car without fainting in the 100 degree heat. People seem so much happier when they wear hats. In spite of the heat and sun, almost no one wears a hat in Spain, unless it’s a barrette, which you see on farmers from the north. The local Guardia Civil has its traditional tricorn hat, but they also have more modern head gear as well. Most women hate hats (other than the previously mentioned English racing fans) because it will flatten out their hair. When I lived in Minnesota, necessity was always more important than style, and women have numerous hats to keep their heads and ears warm. In cold climates, hats are particularly important because frostbite, like cancer, is such an ugly thing (and it hurts!). Experience has taught me that keeping a baseball cap near is always a good thing, regardless of the circumstance. Some shun hats because they are not in style, but I would suggest that head gear of any kind can save you from harm, sunburn, rain, snow, frostbite, falling rocks, errant birds (and their poop). One should always take one’s hat off inside, especially in churches, restaurants, and home. Never wear a hat in bed, especially when a raincoat might be more appropriate. Rappers wear lots of hats, sometimes making a statement, sometimes not. The all-time best hat may be what deep-sea divers wear, although Russian winter hats are very impressive. I like Indiana Jone’s hat, but the most elaborate hat award goes to the Pope. Are hoodies hats? The whole world wonders. A final thought: if your baseball cap is greasy, stained, smelly, and worn out, should you throw it away?

On hats

You can tell a lot about a person by the hat they (don’t) wear. I’m not talking about the silly bit hats that the English ladies wear to their formal horse races, nor am I talking about actors in gangster films with their standard gangster hats. Or am I? A lot of people wear hats to protect their heads–fire fighters, race car drivers, cyclists, astronauts, football players, construction workers, but some wear hats to identify who they are–baseball players, policemen, mountain climbers, stalkers, nuns, graduates, professors. Lots of guys in college wear hats, but if it’s not to cover up a bad hair day (no shower), I have no idea why they do it. I wear hats to keep the sun off of my head. I have a variety of caps and hats that protect the delicate skin of my skull. Skin cancer is such an ugly thing. As I keep the sun off of my pate, I also stay cooler. The sun in Texas and in Spain is very, very hot, and often a hat is the difference between making it from the office to the car without fainting in the 100 degree heat. People seem so much happier when they wear hats. In spite of the heat and sun, almost no one wears a hat in Spain, unless it’s a barrette, which you see on farmers from the north. The local Guardia Civil has its traditional tricorn hat, but they also have more modern head gear as well. Most women hate hats (other than the previously mentioned English racing fans) because it will flatten out their hair. When I lived in Minnesota, necessity was always more important than style, and women have numerous hats to keep their heads and ears warm. In cold climates, hats are particularly important because frostbite, like cancer, is such an ugly thing (and it hurts!). Experience has taught me that keeping a baseball cap near is always a good thing, regardless of the circumstance. Some shun hats because they are not in style, but I would suggest that head gear of any kind can save you from harm, sunburn, rain, snow, frostbite, falling rocks, errant birds (and their poop). One should always take one’s hat off inside, especially in churches, restaurants, and home. Never wear a hat in bed, especially when a raincoat might be more appropriate. Rappers wear lots of hats, sometimes making a statement, sometimes not. The all-time best hat may be what deep-sea divers wear, although Russian winter hats are very impressive. I like Indiana Jone’s hat, but the most elaborate hat award goes to the Pope. Are hoodies hats? The whole world wonders. A final thought: if your baseball cap is greasy, stained, smelly, and worn out, should you throw it away?

On cell phones

They are both a blessing and a curse. I bemoan the slavery to which we subject ourselves by owning and using these electronic chains, but I rejoice in the connectivity they provide. I can talk to a colleague in Bologna or a relative in Madrid. I can send a text when running late. Locate a family member in a crowd. Multitask to my heart’s desire. And yet I am a slave to my phone, constantly checking for messages. One thing that I will not do is talk and drive or text and drive. Talking on the phone in the car makes me a bad driver, but texting makes me blind, stupid and distracted while driving. The same tool that keeps me in communication with the world, can also kill me in a second if I let it. Driving and texting are not compatible. I also try to keep my conversation private, and I abhor people who think that just because they are talking to a third party that you cannot hear them. The other day, a woman talked to her sister about her visit to the gynecologist that morning. I heard all about the gory details of the exam, the doctor’s cold hands, and about a particularly nasty std that she will have to take antibiotics to get rid of. And she didn’t know there was a copay. No, she was not pregnant. I got up out of my chair and closed the door. Too much information. I hold my conversations in private, and I think it is extremely creepy to watch a man or woman walk through the airport and appear to talk to themselves. I am disturbed by people who weep into their phones. I don’t want to hear that conversation either. Sometimes I think that cell phones actually separate us from reality, that cell phones are really isolating, and that one might become addicted to phones and eschew real human contact. Rejecting a face to face interview, replacing a real interview with a phone conversation–the interaction is different, dehumanizing, isolating. Call me old-fashioned, but a phone has a purpose, getting or delivering information. When we substitute a phone conversation for real human interaction, we debase our humanity and marginalize ourselves. The phone becomes more important than the people to whom we are connected. A cup of coffee, a cold Arnold Palmer, a glass of beer, a little bourbon on the rocks can be a common place where we connect to others on a human level, face-to-face, watching gestures, looking into the eyes of our interlocutor. The cell phone is a tool that the user must control, but it is also a tool which must be controlled because it is only too easy to be controlled by it. The cemeteries and hospitals are only too full of people who let themselves be controlled by a simple electronic gadget.

On cell phones

They are both a blessing and a curse. I bemoan the slavery to which we subject ourselves by owning and using these electronic chains, but I rejoice in the connectivity they provide. I can talk to a colleague in Bologna or a relative in Madrid. I can send a text when running late. Locate a family member in a crowd. Multitask to my heart’s desire. And yet I am a slave to my phone, constantly checking for messages. One thing that I will not do is talk and drive or text and drive. Talking on the phone in the car makes me a bad driver, but texting makes me blind, stupid and distracted while driving. The same tool that keeps me in communication with the world, can also kill me in a second if I let it. Driving and texting are not compatible. I also try to keep my conversation private, and I abhor people who think that just because they are talking to a third party that you cannot hear them. The other day, a woman talked to her sister about her visit to the gynecologist that morning. I heard all about the gory details of the exam, the doctor’s cold hands, and about a particularly nasty std that she will have to take antibiotics to get rid of. And she didn’t know there was a copay. No, she was not pregnant. I got up out of my chair and closed the door. Too much information. I hold my conversations in private, and I think it is extremely creepy to watch a man or woman walk through the airport and appear to talk to themselves. I am disturbed by people who weep into their phones. I don’t want to hear that conversation either. Sometimes I think that cell phones actually separate us from reality, that cell phones are really isolating, and that one might become addicted to phones and eschew real human contact. Rejecting a face to face interview, replacing a real interview with a phone conversation–the interaction is different, dehumanizing, isolating. Call me old-fashioned, but a phone has a purpose, getting or delivering information. When we substitute a phone conversation for real human interaction, we debase our humanity and marginalize ourselves. The phone becomes more important than the people to whom we are connected. A cup of coffee, a cold Arnold Palmer, a glass of beer, a little bourbon on the rocks can be a common place where we connect to others on a human level, face-to-face, watching gestures, looking into the eyes of our interlocutor. The cell phone is a tool that the user must control, but it is also a tool which must be controlled because it is only too easy to be controlled by it. The cemeteries and hospitals are only too full of people who let themselves be controlled by a simple electronic gadget.