This year's resolution? Not being an A-Hole. I don't like my odds.

About this time each year I write a post about my goals for the next year.  Maybe it’s the 54% I scored on last years list, this year I’m going to be a little less specific about my 2018 plans. 

There’s the obvious goals, marathon running and being less fat and figuring out a way to not be balding and graying.  Those, I suppose, should be tattooed on me somewhere as their permanence seems to be outliving yours truly.  

So yes, I intend to run a marathon this year.  I’m not entirely sure which one as the one I was planning takes place on the same day as a little event called the “Burning Can Relay” which is an activity even dumber than it sounds.  I am planning on losing some weight and honestly, considering the way I bulked up this winter, it’s a needed resolution.  Not sure there is a whole lot I can do about my hair situation, maybe its time to commit and get rid of it entirely, beat God to the punch so to speak.  

I want to play a little more golf, make more time for my friends and family and get a little more serious writing done.  But all of these things are a little more specific than I am intending.  So my less specific plans for 2018…

Have my default setting be “kind”.  Over the last couple of years, the world seems to have become a spiteful place, and its pretty easy to follow down that rabbit hole.  I have found myself assuming the worst of people and I’m guessing that is a fairly self-fulfilling prophecy.  Perhaps it’s time for a reboot of perspective.  I used to believe, and probably still do, that people’s internal compass is tuned to “good” and it takes some effort to steer away from it.  I really haven’t met enough people that defy their compass to merit painting with brush that I have been of late. 

“Let it go”.  Darby would appreciate this one and its relationship to a certain Frozen character.  Along with defaulting to “kind”, letting shit go comes down to the saying “be nice, you don’t know what someone else is going through”.  It is pretty ridiculous to complain about traffic to someone who may be dealing with health issues, or job issues, or family issues or money issues, and here’s the rub, EVERYONE is dealing with something.  And odds dictate that that something is more serious than the line at the grocery store or my head cold. Frankly, I allow myself to stress enough about the petty stuff that it makes the big stuff seem insurmountable.  It’s a miracle I don’t just curl up in a corner and shiver sometimes. 

Get Up.  I used to get up around 5:00 every morning and enjoy a cup of coffee, a book and maybe a sunrise run.  Those early mornings have given way to evening TV and snooze alarms.  Its funny, there are things in the world that make you feel really good and its easy to forget them.  I love sitting on my deck with a cup of coffee early in the morning.  Conversely, I hate the way being rushed in the morning feels.  Interesting that I would chose lazy to productive, but alas, here we are.

Quit waiting.  I’ve been better about changing the things that make me unhappy but it’s time to step that up a bit.  The way I see it, you only get one go around on this flat planet (not sure if that is accurate but I’ve been reading that a bunch of people believe it) and it’s not worth doing something that makes you miserable.  In the spirit of transparency, this is something I have battled against for the better part of three decades.  It may take some work. 

So that’s it, not changing the world, becoming fit enough to be a model or hit ANOTHER hole in one. 

So, if there’s a message here, girls, I suppose it’s to plot your own course.  The thing about resolutions are that they give you carte blanche to make yourself a better version of you along with a little accountability.  It’s pretty liberating, actually. 

My Kids May Be Ungrateful Turds...and Happy New Year!

We have tried for years to be able to take our little crew to the land of Disney but for one reason or another we always came up a little short.  Be it money or time or whatever else comes up it just hasn’t happened.  Our concern has become that if we don’t do it soon, some of the magic might be lost for our eldest, Avery.  We decided, that for Christmas this year, we would bite the bullet and give the girls their long-anticipated trip to the ‘House of Mouse’.

The trip won’t be until February, but we decided to give the girls the gift at Christmas so that the family could enjoy their receiving it and we could make a big to-do about it.  The problem became the actual giving of the gift.  We happened to have friends in Disney World in early December, so we had three of the stereotypical mouse ear hats made up with their names on the back of each one.  We figured we would give them the hats and let them figure it out for themselves.  Best laid plans of Mickey Mice and men.

I came up with what I thought was a genius idea.  We would elaborately decorate a large box with the hats inside but tell the girls that it was a gift for their grandfather, Poppy.  Earlier in the Fall Poppy had given the girls his Nintendo Wii as theirs had crapped the proverbial bed. We told the girls that the box had a Wii in it and we would be giving it to Poppy after the last present had been given.  The box was wrapped in loud purple wrapping paper and tons of bows.  The girls loved the idea of giving Poppy a purple girlie box.

The trap was set and the game was afoot.  We began opening gifts, but the Disney gift was constantly scratching at the back of my head.  Short of and engagement ring this was the biggest, priciest gift I had ever given.  To say I was nervous would be an understatement.  Perhaps not engagement ring giving nervous but nervous nonetheless. 

We finally got through the glut of gifts that had spilled out from under the tree onto the living room floor.  We promise each other every year that the pile would be smaller.  We had failed again.  No matter, the gifts were open and the girls were excited.

They ran into the next room to retrieve their prize.  The y set it on their grandfathers lap and helped him tear into it.  Adrienne filmed and I watched her fight back tears. 

They all tore tissue paper out of the box and revealed the hats.  One by one they pulled them out of the box and put them on the appropriate heads. 

Macy seemed to get it a little, but was pretty reserved.

Darby took one more cursory look in the box and was satisfied with the hat itself.  She grabbed a tub of Pla-Doh and made her way into the kitchen. 

Avery looked confused.  She lifted the last of the tissue paper from the box.  She then mouthed to my wife and me, “Where’s the Wii?”.  She was genuinely concerned about her Poppy not getting the gift they had been told about. 

Despite questions and prodding from the adults in the room, they never got all that excited.  We never got the payoff we were looking for.  Ugh.

Later, after discussing in detail what was planned, they seemed to get it and get excited, but to be honest, it was too little too late.  Both Adrienne and I spent the rest of the day feeling a touch hollow. 

As the next day moved along, it became obvious that the excitement of the trip was beginning to settle in.  It was nice that they seemed to get excited but deep down, I wanted that moment of excitement when they realized what they had received initially. 

The lesson here ladies?  This one is about me and perhaps your mother.  While I admit that maybe you need to remember to be sufficiently grateful for what comes your way, the true lesson is for me.  I truly try to live by the “better to give than to receive” idea.  In that, it’s not at all fair for me to be upset when you don’t give the reaction I was looking for.  That’s not the idea of gift giving, it’s a perk.  At the same time, when the trip is over and the fun has been had, ‘thank yous’ will be in order. 

The goal of gift giving shouldn’t be to appear generous or magnanimous.  It should be to simply try to give something to someone who may like or need it.  The moment you consider their gratitude, you go from a charitable act to a quid-pro-quo one.  I suppose the point of it all, the gift giving and such is to make someone else feel good and that should be reward enough.  Tough to do, actually, I only bat about .300 on it.

Tales of a Smart-Assed Dumb Ass

Like any father I worry about my kids as they grow older.  With my eldest, we had concerns with math and shyness, with my middle it was her ability to keep hands to herself and not solving her problems with fisticuffs.  Lately it’s my youngest, Darby.  Overall, she is a happy-go-lucky first grader who can find the fun in just about anything.  She’s cute as a bug and as smart a kid as you will meet.  Not that it’s a concept that I put stock in, but if there is such a thing, she is an old soul.  There is something behind her eyes that tells me that things need to make sense long before she is buying in blindly.  She is a great kid.

That being said, I worry.  I worry because she often stands in line for school by herself.  I worry because she seems just as happy playing solo.  I worry because she has one really close friend and hates the idea of deviating from her at all.  Mostly I worry because she reminds me of me. 

This may come as a shock but I haven’t always been this put together (joke intended).  In my younger years, I went from shy to chubby to zit faced to awkward to college.  I spent my grade school years with a few close friends.  Being in Catholic school makes it difficult to determine if it was class size that limited my friend base or my penchant for Toughskin jeans.  Either way, I was a little fish in a little pond.  In middle school, I remained little in popularity alone.  The pond grew as did my waistline.  Most of the friends that I had from grade school went to a cross town middle school and I was more alone than ever.  What I found was that kids from public school already knew each other, cliques were already formed.  I spent those three years concentrating on baseball in the summer and avoiding bullies and avoiding girls the rest of the year.  High school carried many of the same problems but my weight went down.  I suspect that my weight loss would have helped my situation if acne hadn’t decided to rear its greasy head. 

Truth be told, my senior year was okay, I changed schools and benefited from ‘new-kid syndrome’.  This is a syndrome where you can either be a total outcast or a total mystery.  Fortunately for me, I fell into the latter.  In the end, the scoreboard read, one good year, eleven somewhat miserable ones.  This is not intended to be a ‘woe is me’ type of story, but it is necessary to get the back story so you can see where I am coming from as it relates to my little one. 

Long story short, I spent grade school and middle school wishing I wasn’t there and high school making that a reality.  I skipped class and took classes at the local community college.  A hearty mix of dumb-ass and smart-ass. 

If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have worried about it so much.  I still don’t have a huge group of friends, but the ones I have I would do anything for, and for the most part, I think they would reciprocate.  I don’t get caught up in gossip.  I’m able to draw very clear boundaries and limits with people.  All in all, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t.  I hated it like intestinal flu, but it made me stronger.

Which brings me to Darby.   I get it, sweetheart, I truly do.  I understand why you stand in line by yourself or only want to play with your one great friend.  Hell, I don’t fault you for any of it.  I’d be a hypocrite if I did. 

Here’s the thing girls.  You may not need a huge group of friends, but you may want one from time to time.  The thing with that is to make friends you have to put yourself out there a little.  It’s not always fun.  It can feel like you’re faking it.  You might have to talk to people in line at school, you may have to join clubs or teams, you might have to ~gasp~ play with more than one person at recess.  You never know which ones will stick either.  Most of my best friends in the world come from job waiting tables over a decade ago. Those guys can be goofy, absentminded, hyper competitive and make jokes at my expense and frankly, I wouldn’t trade them for the world.  Just don’t tell them that.