Thursday, June 5, 2014
Look at me, I'm Sandra Lee, Lousy with Divinity......
So I was in my kitchen doing a little cooking. Had the TV on Sandra Lee's Cooking Show, Half-Assed Homemade? or something like that. I noticed she whisks instant pudding like a linebacker. She needs to work on her form. As much I don't appreciate seeing all of Giada's back teeth every time she smiles, at least she doesn't whisk like she's cleaning a gas station toilet.
Cobwebs in their Attics
I like to watch Antique Roadshow. It always strikes me funny to see the people trying to keep their cool when they tell them "Your 1978 Tupperware lid by itself would likely fetch $5,000 dollars if put up for auction." They just sit there and go "0h my, isn't that's wonderful". Like they knew it all along.
Then they vow to never sell it because:
a) it's a family heirloom
b) it has sentimental value because their great aunt used to cover her famous potato salad with it , or c)if they ever find a bowl to match they'll be able to use it one day.
"It's a perfectly good lid, you know. I could never part with it."
Then they vow to never sell it because:
a) it's a family heirloom
b) it has sentimental value because their great aunt used to cover her famous potato salad with it , or c)if they ever find a bowl to match they'll be able to use it one day.
"It's a perfectly good lid, you know. I could never part with it."
Smurfs
WTF Moment of The Day: Trying to explain cyanosis in reference to lips turning blue: But why do they turn blue? Due to lack of oxygen in the blood. But why do they turn blue? Due to lack of oxygen-rich blood circulating in the body. But why do they turn blue? Possibly due to blood loss. But why do they turn blue? Possibly due to oxygen supply being cut off, such as drowning or asphyxiation. But why do they turn BLUE? WTF? Because, the book says so Brainy Smurf! Geesh! Get out of my office.
Some women suffer from PMS, I suffer from PBS.
I don't know how to break the news to my husband that I meant to marry the writer, Shelby Foote. It was just that his gray hair, beard, and mustache threw me off. It was an easy mistake. Especially because my husband does narrate all goings-on in our household. I just wish he'd quit following me around showing me black and white photos of coal miners, soldiers, and hungry street children with distant stares. (Ok I'll quit updating my status while watching PBS). Btw PBS stands for 'plenty of black-n-white shows'.
I'm No Eienstein
So....I'm on vacation this week. Decided to hit the beach for a little R and R. Needed something to read so I pulled Walter Isaacson's book on Albert Einstein down. Sat on the beach at Presley's Lake in moss point, mississippy and read for several hours only to realize the dust jacket which bears his photo and name in big bold letters was on upside down. So much for worrying about looking pretentious in Mississippi.
Eating Weeds and Words
2 questions I need a definitive answer to:
1. Is "weedeat" an actual word? And
2. What is the past tense of weedeat?
Weedate? Weedeated? Weedeaten?
1. Is "weedeat" an actual word? And
2. What is the past tense of weedeat?
Weedate? Weedeated? Weedeaten?
Alabama Girl Lost in Chicago - 2009
Chicago Log Book - Day 1: Remember the Alamo
Had a problem with car rental at airport, had to sic corporate Alamo on a guy who we'll call "Bill-the dumb-ass" who was forced at policy-point over the phone to give "the crazy bitch" (me) a car before she throws a conniption fit in the baggage claim!! It all worked out good.
Chicago Log Book - Day 2- Ms. Garmond and the New Yankee Workshop
I thought my hotel was in a deserted part of town, because it was not too busy around here when I arrived on Sun., however at 6am, it became Mardi-Gras-Parade's-over-let's-beat-the-trafficTraffic x 10.
Early in the day I had a little spat with my sherpa, Ms. Garmond, she said "Turn right" and I didn't want to and after awhile of me doing my own thing, she got mad and crossed her arms and said she was tired of wasting her breath.
But after class today I decided to drive into downtown Chicago and came back out tight-chested-white-knuckled pleading for Ms. Garmond to tell me which exit/entrance, /left/right/whatever you want me to do Ms. Garmond, just get me out of here alive <sobbing hysterically> till the evil Ms. Garmon smugly said "Keep left, exit left in point two miles." We now have an understanding.
In class today, I met roughly 20-25 ladies from the Chicago and Joliet area and I have but two words to say:"Woof" and "Woof". Now I understand why they have to get all pissy about our southern "beauty" pageants and want them to be "scholarship" competitions. Because a beauty pageant requires that one not be an aesthetic equivalent of syrup of ipecac.
Chicago Log Book - Day 3: Miss Scah-let meets the Zombies
Another day in class. I learned about all the equipment on the fire trucks here, I learned about ventilating "Ruffs" in firefighting. I think I am going to have to buy some cheap jeans and a hoodie sweat shirt and some sneeeekers to fit in. I also need to dye my roots black and stop exfoliating my face. I remember Mama always telling me, "put some lipstick on, you don't want to look like a corpse." This week I am learning the true meaning behind that. Remember the Zombie's in Sean of the Dead? They have that kind of fashion sense going on up here. Everyone, everywhere from every walk of life is wearing an ugly hoodie with bad dye jobs and no make-up and ruddy skin. (Yes, I know it's cold up here, but still it's just not Natch-A-Rule.)
Ms. Garmond and I got along a lot better today. She told me she knew where Kohl's and other stores were hidden in this city. So I happily obeyed her every command. She took me to Border's Bookstore where I purchased a few things. The clerk was waiting on a customer ahead of me and asked if they had a discount club card. They said "Oh, you don't have it with you? Why we can cheerfully look it up with your phone number or email address!" So i thought hmmmmmmmm....my darling sister, Margaret buys every book ever written and she travels a bit too. So surely she has one and Voile! I just happen to know her phone number and email address. So when they asked me I said "Well, I did but gosh, I don't happen to have my card. I'm not even sure if it's still valid anymore." Mr. Cheerful Clerk Man said "Don't worry, be happy, they never expire, what's your phone number?" So with visions of flames of hell encircling me I rattled off Margaret's phone number and he said "Eileen McKenzie?" I mumbled uh-huh. And he gave me the discount. hahahahaha. Margaret, I am assuming Eileen McKenzie is one of your pen names. But any hoot, thanks for the discount.
Other than lying to sales clerks, I am now eating Chicago Pizza and thinking "Wow, this tastes just like Mobile, Alabama pizza!" HOODATHUNKIT!
I have noticed a strange phenomenon up here. Although the traffic is heavy and fast, it doesn't seem too dangerous out in this area, people aren't cutting each other off and stuff. They seem rather polite (albeit fast) driving except for one tiny thing that will set them into a bloodthirsty rage and ready to shoot you in the back of your head: Not going on a green light within a nano-second of it turning green.
I mean they want you to go when the color-spectrum turns from pale pinkish to pale lime-greenish. I am afraid to blink while sitting at a light for fear that my lids may not come back up as quickly as the driver behind me would like.
I'll tell you what, I am learning quick that I am truly a southern woman and ready to come back home. When I get home, I'm going to sit at a green light and put on 2 full coats of lipstick. At least down there, the women (who were brought up right) understand this completely and when the gentlemen see us give the "all done" Mu-whah! into the rear view mirror, well, they don't seem to mind the wait after all.
Chicago Log Book - Day 4: This Planet Is Uninhabitable For Some Life Forms (Namely Mine)
Went to bed with scratchy throat and stuffy nose, but I thought it was from screaming "Come on 12-32-39-53-54-19!!!" at the top my lungs like my lottery ticket was a racehorse at Church Hill Downs. I thought the stuffy nose was due to the wailing and gnashing of teeth after I lost the lottery along with half of my Facebook friends (which included 2 sisters). (Ya'll greedy Bahstahds!) But I awoke today to find both of those symptoms even worse.
I went to class and the symptoms proceeded to worsen throughout the morning. A lady sitting behind me in class who is also an alien on this planet, (from South Carolina) seems to have developed the same illness. The Sweatshirt Hoodie Girls (aka the Sand People) seem to be immune to it. Perhaps their hoodie shirts hold some anti-viral lifesaving properties. Perhaps they're the opposite of small pox blankets (look it up), perhaps this is some weird biological warfare, where they wear a sweatshirt made up of NyQuil and laugh while the Paula Deen wannabe catches her death. (I could swear I saw one of them licking their sleeveyesterday).
Anyway at lunch I went to Walgreen's and had the Psuedofed Police interrogate me for 15 minutes like Lenny Briscoe on Law & Order about why I wanted the Meth-making drugs and peering over the cash register like I was standing there smoking a crack pipe while picking up a child porn photo mug from the photo department.
Sherlock finally gave me the drugs and yes it cleared my stuffy nose up right away. Of course, then I had a RUNNY nose for the rest of class and had to do some role-playing exercises with ~get this~ a pregnant wheel chair bound crippled chick whom I kept sneezing on. I may have killed her as she wasn't wearing the anit-viral hoodie. I'll know if she's not there for the test tomorrow. I'm too sick to write anymore, must seek out more meds (I wonder if I have enough to make meth? I am in a hotel room after all. ) Too... weak.... to... type..... any...more.....
Chicago Log Book - Day 5: My WTF Moments in Customer Service.I must admit everywhere that I have eaten so far on this trip I have received excellent customer service. So good it is getting annoying.
One day I ate at KFC for a quick lunch. The Senorita taking my order was intent on making me eat my vegetables. I just wanted 2 pieces of chicken. No, no sides thank you. No, seriously, can't I get just the chicken and biscuit, like a snack? But I don't want the side, what's that 2 sides, no I don't want 2 sides, I don't even want one side, just the chicken and drink, OK? That's OK, I don't mind if it cost more for just the chicken. Thank you for trying to get me a fried chicken grant to help me pay for it. Really, money is no object, I just want <whimpering now> a piece of friggin' chicken.
I understand and I appreciate your kindness and thoughtfulness and looking out for me in these tough economic times but if you don't give me a chicken leg in 5 seconds I'm going to have to eat somewhere else.
Senorita finally took my card and gave me the chicken and looked so sad to see me eating a side-less overpriced chicken meal. I think I heard her sniffle a bit and make the sign of the cross, as she walked off.
I also went to a pizza joint named something weird like Ricobene's. The guy (Rick O'Bean, I presume)looked like Al Pacino if he had never gotten a second acting job. (Washed up pizza maker man). I told him what I wanted, he walked off. Just disappeared. He was right in front of me, poof!, not there anymore. Never saw him again for about 10 minutes. Never saw anyone else (should've took the cash register). Then he came back with a pizza and said in a kinda eerie flat quite voice "hope you like, NEXT!!!!!!! at the top of his lungs. I was nice enough to remind him that I still needed to pay. He looked insulted, like I was calling him old and senile. He took the money anyway.
Too tired to write anymore tonight. Have to get up early and find my way back to the airport,car rental drop off place, etc. That should bring plenty of entertainment. Going lie down and watch a video on Toxic Agents such as the plague (which I'm pretty sure I have) and small pox (which I don't have yet, but have put a down payment on) and other biological warfare goodies. Night night all.
Had a problem with car rental at airport, had to sic corporate Alamo on a guy who we'll call "Bill-the dumb-ass" who was forced at policy-point over the phone to give "the crazy bitch" (me) a car before she throws a conniption fit in the baggage claim!! It all worked out good.
Chicago Log Book - Day 2- Ms. Garmond and the New Yankee Workshop
I thought my hotel was in a deserted part of town, because it was not too busy around here when I arrived on Sun., however at 6am, it became Mardi-Gras-Parade's-over-let's-beat-the-trafficTraffic x 10.
Early in the day I had a little spat with my sherpa, Ms. Garmond, she said "Turn right" and I didn't want to and after awhile of me doing my own thing, she got mad and crossed her arms and said she was tired of wasting her breath.
But after class today I decided to drive into downtown Chicago and came back out tight-chested-white-knuckled pleading for Ms. Garmond to tell me which exit/entrance, /left/right/whatever you want me to do Ms. Garmond, just get me out of here alive <sobbing hysterically> till the evil Ms. Garmon smugly said "Keep left, exit left in point two miles." We now have an understanding.
In class today, I met roughly 20-25 ladies from the Chicago and Joliet area and I have but two words to say:"Woof" and "Woof". Now I understand why they have to get all pissy about our southern "beauty" pageants and want them to be "scholarship" competitions. Because a beauty pageant requires that one not be an aesthetic equivalent of syrup of ipecac.
Chicago Log Book - Day 3: Miss Scah-let meets the Zombies
Another day in class. I learned about all the equipment on the fire trucks here, I learned about ventilating "Ruffs" in firefighting. I think I am going to have to buy some cheap jeans and a hoodie sweat shirt and some sneeeekers to fit in. I also need to dye my roots black and stop exfoliating my face. I remember Mama always telling me, "put some lipstick on, you don't want to look like a corpse." This week I am learning the true meaning behind that. Remember the Zombie's in Sean of the Dead? They have that kind of fashion sense going on up here. Everyone, everywhere from every walk of life is wearing an ugly hoodie with bad dye jobs and no make-up and ruddy skin. (Yes, I know it's cold up here, but still it's just not Natch-A-Rule.)
Ms. Garmond and I got along a lot better today. She told me she knew where Kohl's and other stores were hidden in this city. So I happily obeyed her every command. She took me to Border's Bookstore where I purchased a few things. The clerk was waiting on a customer ahead of me and asked if they had a discount club card. They said "Oh, you don't have it with you? Why we can cheerfully look it up with your phone number or email address!" So i thought hmmmmmmmm....my darling sister, Margaret buys every book ever written and she travels a bit too. So surely she has one and Voile! I just happen to know her phone number and email address. So when they asked me I said "Well, I did but gosh, I don't happen to have my card. I'm not even sure if it's still valid anymore." Mr. Cheerful Clerk Man said "Don't worry, be happy, they never expire, what's your phone number?" So with visions of flames of hell encircling me I rattled off Margaret's phone number and he said "Eileen McKenzie?" I mumbled uh-huh. And he gave me the discount. hahahahaha. Margaret, I am assuming Eileen McKenzie is one of your pen names. But any hoot, thanks for the discount.
Other than lying to sales clerks, I am now eating Chicago Pizza and thinking "Wow, this tastes just like Mobile, Alabama pizza!" HOODATHUNKIT!
I have noticed a strange phenomenon up here. Although the traffic is heavy and fast, it doesn't seem too dangerous out in this area, people aren't cutting each other off and stuff. They seem rather polite (albeit fast) driving except for one tiny thing that will set them into a bloodthirsty rage and ready to shoot you in the back of your head: Not going on a green light within a nano-second of it turning green.
I mean they want you to go when the color-spectrum turns from pale pinkish to pale lime-greenish. I am afraid to blink while sitting at a light for fear that my lids may not come back up as quickly as the driver behind me would like.
I'll tell you what, I am learning quick that I am truly a southern woman and ready to come back home. When I get home, I'm going to sit at a green light and put on 2 full coats of lipstick. At least down there, the women (who were brought up right) understand this completely and when the gentlemen see us give the "all done" Mu-whah! into the rear view mirror, well, they don't seem to mind the wait after all.
Chicago Log Book - Day 4: This Planet Is Uninhabitable For Some Life Forms (Namely Mine)
Went to bed with scratchy throat and stuffy nose, but I thought it was from screaming "Come on 12-32-39-53-54-19!!!" at the top my lungs like my lottery ticket was a racehorse at Church Hill Downs. I thought the stuffy nose was due to the wailing and gnashing of teeth after I lost the lottery along with half of my Facebook friends (which included 2 sisters). (Ya'll greedy Bahstahds!) But I awoke today to find both of those symptoms even worse.
I went to class and the symptoms proceeded to worsen throughout the morning. A lady sitting behind me in class who is also an alien on this planet, (from South Carolina) seems to have developed the same illness. The Sweatshirt Hoodie Girls (aka the Sand People) seem to be immune to it. Perhaps their hoodie shirts hold some anti-viral lifesaving properties. Perhaps they're the opposite of small pox blankets (look it up), perhaps this is some weird biological warfare, where they wear a sweatshirt made up of NyQuil and laugh while the Paula Deen wannabe catches her death. (I could swear I saw one of them licking their sleeveyesterday).
Anyway at lunch I went to Walgreen's and had the Psuedofed Police interrogate me for 15 minutes like Lenny Briscoe on Law & Order about why I wanted the Meth-making drugs and peering over the cash register like I was standing there smoking a crack pipe while picking up a child porn photo mug from the photo department.
Sherlock finally gave me the drugs and yes it cleared my stuffy nose up right away. Of course, then I had a RUNNY nose for the rest of class and had to do some role-playing exercises with ~get this~ a pregnant wheel chair bound crippled chick whom I kept sneezing on. I may have killed her as she wasn't wearing the anit-viral hoodie. I'll know if she's not there for the test tomorrow. I'm too sick to write anymore, must seek out more meds (I wonder if I have enough to make meth? I am in a hotel room after all. ) Too... weak.... to... type..... any...more.....
Chicago Log Book - Day 5: My WTF Moments in Customer Service.I must admit everywhere that I have eaten so far on this trip I have received excellent customer service. So good it is getting annoying.
One day I ate at KFC for a quick lunch. The Senorita taking my order was intent on making me eat my vegetables. I just wanted 2 pieces of chicken. No, no sides thank you. No, seriously, can't I get just the chicken and biscuit, like a snack? But I don't want the side, what's that 2 sides, no I don't want 2 sides, I don't even want one side, just the chicken and drink, OK? That's OK, I don't mind if it cost more for just the chicken. Thank you for trying to get me a fried chicken grant to help me pay for it. Really, money is no object, I just want <whimpering now> a piece of friggin' chicken.
I understand and I appreciate your kindness and thoughtfulness and looking out for me in these tough economic times but if you don't give me a chicken leg in 5 seconds I'm going to have to eat somewhere else.
Senorita finally took my card and gave me the chicken and looked so sad to see me eating a side-less overpriced chicken meal. I think I heard her sniffle a bit and make the sign of the cross, as she walked off.
I also went to a pizza joint named something weird like Ricobene's. The guy (Rick O'Bean, I presume)looked like Al Pacino if he had never gotten a second acting job. (Washed up pizza maker man). I told him what I wanted, he walked off. Just disappeared. He was right in front of me, poof!, not there anymore. Never saw him again for about 10 minutes. Never saw anyone else (should've took the cash register). Then he came back with a pizza and said in a kinda eerie flat quite voice "hope you like, NEXT!!!!!!! at the top of his lungs. I was nice enough to remind him that I still needed to pay. He looked insulted, like I was calling him old and senile. He took the money anyway.
Too tired to write anymore tonight. Have to get up early and find my way back to the airport,car rental drop off place, etc. That should bring plenty of entertainment. Going lie down and watch a video on Toxic Agents such as the plague (which I'm pretty sure I have) and small pox (which I don't have yet, but have put a down payment on) and other biological warfare goodies. Night night all.
Photo Album of my Chicago Trip
Getting a little fun in.
Got my game on!
Hanging with the hoodie girls from my class.
He said my Sox were the whitest!
Joined a gang of friends for a Paint Party at the viaduct.
Made the local newspaper.
Went out dancing!
Mike Ditka proposed!
Some random guy I picked up on the waterfront.
Threw a small child off the Sears Tower. Hee hee
Took in an art show with some friends from high school.
Trying to help Obama get the Olympics to Chicago. Sorry dude.
Visited with an old friend, He showed me his vault.
Whew, firefighting class gets me tired.
OK, what happens in Chi-Town stays in Chi-Town!
I won the Hamburger Mary Pageant! Woo-Hoo!
Warning - by Jenny Joseph
Warning - by Jenny Joseph
WHEN I AM AN OLD WOMAN I SHALL WEAR PURPLE
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
Things My Son Should Know After I've Died - by Brian Trimboli
I was young once.
I dug holes
near a canal and almost drowned.
I filled notebooks with words
as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun.
I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction.
I spent a summer swallowing seeds
and nothing ever grew in my stomach.
Every woman I kissed,
I kissed as if I loved her.
My left and right hands were rivals.
After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents’ house
at least twice a year.
No matter when you receive this
there was music playing now.
Your grandfather isn’t
my father.
I chose to do something with my life
that I knew I could not fail at.
I spent my whole life walking
and hid such colorful wings.
I dug holes
near a canal and almost drowned.
I filled notebooks with words
as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun.
I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction.
I spent a summer swallowing seeds
and nothing ever grew in my stomach.
Every woman I kissed,
I kissed as if I loved her.
My left and right hands were rivals.
After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents’ house
at least twice a year.
No matter when you receive this
there was music playing now.
Your grandfather isn’t
my father.
I chose to do something with my life
that I knew I could not fail at.
I spent my whole life walking
and hid such colorful wings.
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned....
June 18, 2013
So I'm in my kitchen.... (again) and I want to try to make court bouillon today. I grew up in the south and, ye, I can make a roux and yes I can make gumbo and, yes, I can make jambalaya. But we all know that sometimes making a roux can be the tedious and precarious part of the cooking. It's gotta be right or you gotta throw it out, right? Right. I know this.
Well our dear friend Alton Brown taught me how to make an oven roux which I find to work very well and much easier to do, with great results everytime. So I had to push the envelope just a little bit farther didn't I? While looking up something on the internet I came across an "even easier way to make a roux" that said you could actually make a roux in the microwave.
Now I know that all you gumbo purists out there just had the wind sucked out of you by that statement. I'm sure every Zirlott, Bosarge and Justin Wilson Disciple out there have just turned into a bunch of bosom-clutchin'-girdle-tuggin' old biddies at the mere thought of me desecrating something so holy. And they would be right.
God taught me a bible lesson today. I'm sure there must have been an 11th commandment that said "Thou shall only make roux in a cast-iron skillett". But when I made the oven roux (in a cast-iron skillet) I think God said "That's ok, but don't go any farther with this idea. Roux is holy and must be made to the depth and bredth and temperatureth and color and aroma that is pleasing to the Lord. Or you will loseth my blessing and shall be cast out of all decent society and black listed from any gumbo cook-offs forever and ever, Amen." But I tried it. I admit it, I just had to try it anyway.
I followed the directions to a tee, used the prescribed vessel (a very large pyrex mixing cup/bowl thingy). Well, that bad boy just blew up and shattered in my microwave. Then I heard a loud voice from on high say "Are ya stooooopid?" (God sounds a lot like Ray Stevens in case you're wondering). Guess I'll go say a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers to try to redeem myself and not end up like Korah in Numbers 16:31-32. I can probably say quite a few while stirring my roux on the stove, don't ya think?
God Bless and Bonjour
So I'm in my kitchen.... (again) and I want to try to make court bouillon today. I grew up in the south and, ye, I can make a roux and yes I can make gumbo and, yes, I can make jambalaya. But we all know that sometimes making a roux can be the tedious and precarious part of the cooking. It's gotta be right or you gotta throw it out, right? Right. I know this.
Well our dear friend Alton Brown taught me how to make an oven roux which I find to work very well and much easier to do, with great results everytime. So I had to push the envelope just a little bit farther didn't I? While looking up something on the internet I came across an "even easier way to make a roux" that said you could actually make a roux in the microwave.
Now I know that all you gumbo purists out there just had the wind sucked out of you by that statement. I'm sure every Zirlott, Bosarge and Justin Wilson Disciple out there have just turned into a bunch of bosom-clutchin'-girdle-tuggin' old biddies at the mere thought of me desecrating something so holy. And they would be right.
God taught me a bible lesson today. I'm sure there must have been an 11th commandment that said "Thou shall only make roux in a cast-iron skillett". But when I made the oven roux (in a cast-iron skillet) I think God said "That's ok, but don't go any farther with this idea. Roux is holy and must be made to the depth and bredth and temperatureth and color and aroma that is pleasing to the Lord. Or you will loseth my blessing and shall be cast out of all decent society and black listed from any gumbo cook-offs forever and ever, Amen." But I tried it. I admit it, I just had to try it anyway.
I followed the directions to a tee, used the prescribed vessel (a very large pyrex mixing cup/bowl thingy). Well, that bad boy just blew up and shattered in my microwave. Then I heard a loud voice from on high say "Are ya stooooopid?" (God sounds a lot like Ray Stevens in case you're wondering). Guess I'll go say a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers to try to redeem myself and not end up like Korah in Numbers 16:31-32. I can probably say quite a few while stirring my roux on the stove, don't ya think?
God Bless and Bonjour
What You'll Wish You'd Known - by Paul Graham
(I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.) ~~Paul Graham
When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1]
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]
We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?
Upwind
I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.
To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.
Ambition
In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.
Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]
Some people say this is inevitable-- that high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day.
The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.
I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]
You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
Corruption
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.
In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing.
Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
Curiosity
And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.
When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?
Now
If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail.
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn.
Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8]
Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.
Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]
This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.
Notes
[1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?"
[2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. So far the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor.
[3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity. Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless. However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these days.
[4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them. I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people. I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgment.
[5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them?
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)
[7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.
[8] And then of course there is money. It's not a big factor in high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants. But a lot of great things were created mainly to make money. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." (Many hope he was exaggerating.)
[9] Even college textbooks are bad. When you get to college, you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who need the money. It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse in the production of high school textbooks.
[10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.
Thanks to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Lisa Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many others for talking to me about high school.
When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does.
If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do.
It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1]
But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up.
What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2]
We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities?
Upwind
I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.
How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student?
Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on.
To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it.
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief.
I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound.
Ambition
In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school.
Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school.
If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work.
When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4]
Some people say this is inevitable-- that high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day.
The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old.
I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends-- that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5]
You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application.
Corruption
It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.
Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6]
Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot.
So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother?
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.
In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing.
Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
Curiosity
And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes.
A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well.
Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class.
One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee.
Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox.
I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary.
Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good.
If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here?
It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do.
The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting-- only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly.
When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.
And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too?
Now
If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them-- not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it.
The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it.
Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.)
It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail.
Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn.
Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8]
Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers.
Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway.
A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books.
The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]
This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted.
Notes
[1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?"
[2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. So far the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor.
[3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity. Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless. However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these days.
[4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them. I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people. I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgment.
[5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction.
[6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them?
It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year.
(I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.)
[7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.
[8] And then of course there is money. It's not a big factor in high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants. But a lot of great things were created mainly to make money. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." (Many hope he was exaggerating.)
[9] Even college textbooks are bad. When you get to college, you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who need the money. It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse in the production of high school textbooks.
[10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration.
Thanks to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Lisa Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many others for talking to me about high school.
Remembering Aunt Baba 1916-2013
Remembering Aunt Baba
"I am no one special. Just a common person with common thoughts. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten. But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who ever lived. I've loved another with all my heart and soul and for me that has always been enough."
(Quote from the movie "The Notebook).
I got the chance for a short moment yesterday to be a child again. Not in the sense of running and playing and being carefree, but in a deeper more meaningful way.
I stood in a group of middle-aged people, some graying and growing thick, with kids and grand kids of their own.
A family comprised of siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews. I realized that God had left us with someone to still take care of us for many years after the passing of our own parents.
We laid to rest our beautiful Aunt Baba at the age of 97.
She had never had children of her own but she left an indelible mark on all of us.
As I listened to the minister talk of her love for others I looked around at all those gathered there.
And for a moment all I saw was a large passel of children, sunburned and barefoot and probably up to something.
Children who once gathered around her and probably gave her fits sometimes.
Children she fed, babysat, laughed at, worried about, prayed for, and delighted in.
I could tell by their faces, that all of those gathered there had felt that she loved them best. And they were right. She did love you best. And you. And you. And you.
She loved us all with the best kind of love. The kind of love that says 'you matter' just for being alive. She loved us like our parents loved us and like God loves us, in spite of our foibles and failures. She could see right through us all and loved us anyway and she made us capable of loving others.
She taught us how it was done and what love was supposed to look like. She led by example.
So, no matter what life has led you to or put you through, if you knew Baba, you can humbly and honestly say "I was loved by someone. I mattered and I was special." Honor her memory by picking up her legacy and pass it on to your own children and grandchildren and to all the friends they drag home behind them. Love them all. Enjoy them. Lighten up a little and let them remember what your laughter sounds like. I think I heard her laughter mentioned by everyone I spoke to yesterday.
The bible says a joyful heart does the body good, like medicine and 97 years ain't nothing to sneeze at.
She lived a simple life in a small house with no extravagant ways. She loved Christ and shared his great news in the simplest of ways. The bible says to spread the good news of God and to love others as yourself. I realize now that Baba did this in a very clever way. Every year I got a a Christmas card from her that always said "Jesus loves ya and I do too. Come see me."
It worked, I know and love Christ, I feel loved and I have faith that God will let me come see her again when he sets the date.
So lotsa love to all my siblings and cousins. Y'all make me feel like I hit the jackpot just by being born into this family.
Rules for Thanksgiving This year
(I did not write this and cannot find who did. If you know, let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.)
Rules for Thanksgiving This year
1. Don’t get in line asking questions about the food. “Who made the potato salad? Is it egg in there? Are the greens fresh? Is the meat in the greens turkey or pork? Who made the macaroni and cheese? What kind of pie is that? Who made it? Ask one more question and I will punch you in your mouth, knocking out all your fronts so you won’t be able to eat anything.
2. If you can’t walk or are missing any limbs, sit your butt down until someone makes your plate for you. Dinner time is not the time for you to be independent. Nibble on them pecans and walnuts to hold you over until someone makes you a plate.
3. If you have kids under the age of twelve, I will escort their little butts to the basement and bring their food down to them. They are not gonna tear my house up this year. Tell them that they are not allowed upstairs until it’s time for Uncle Butchie to start telling family stories about their mommas and papas. If they come upstairs for any reason except for that they are bleeding to death, I will tear their butts up and you better not ask why!
4. There is going to be one prayer for Thanksgiving dinner! JUST ONE! We do not care that you are thankful that your 13 year old daughter gave birth to a healthy baby or your nephew just got out of jail. The time limit for the prayer is one minute. If you are still talking after that one minute is up, you will feel something hard come across your lips and they will be swollen for approximately 20 minutes.
5. Finish everything on your plate before you go up for seconds! If you don’t, you will be asked to stay your greedy butt home next year!
6. BRING YOUR OWN TUPPERWARE!! Don’t let me catch you fixing yourself a plate in my good Tupperware knowing that I will never see it again! Furthermore, if you didn’t bring anything over, don’t let me catch you making a plate period or it will be a misunderstanding. And why are you making plates before you eat? You never bring a dish or offer a dime do you?
7. What you came with is what you should leave with!! Do not leave my house with anything that doesn’t belong to you. EVERYBODY WILL BE SUBJECTED TO A BODY SEARCH COMING AND GOING OUT OF MY DOMAIN!!!
8. Do not leave your kids so you can go hopping from house to house. This is not a DAYCARE CENTER ! There will be a kid-parent roll call every ten minutes. Any parent that is not present at the time of roll call, your child will be put outside until you come and get him or her. After 24 hours, I will call CPS!
9. BOOK YOUR HOTEL ROOM BEFORE YOU COME INTO TOWN!! There will be no sleeping over at my house! You are to come and eat dinner and go home or to your hotel room. EVERYBODY GETS KICKED OUT AT 11:00 pm. You will get a 15 minute warning bell ring.
10. Last but not least! ONE PLATE PER PERSON!! This is not a soup kitchen. I am not trying to feed your family until Christmas dinner! You will be supervised when you fix your plate. Anything over the appropriate amount will be charged to you before you leave. There will be a cash register at the door. Thanks to Cousin Alfred and his greedy family, we now have a credit card machine! So VISA and MASTERCARD are now being accepted. NO FOOD STAMPS OR ACCESS CARDS YET!
P.S.-All cell phones will be stored in a box so we can cut all texting and phone calls during the meal. Please do not come in here talking to ya boo who couldn’t make it or to the family member that wants a plate, but is either too lazy or has too much friction w/ the rest of the family to show.
Rules for Thanksgiving This year
1. Don’t get in line asking questions about the food. “Who made the potato salad? Is it egg in there? Are the greens fresh? Is the meat in the greens turkey or pork? Who made the macaroni and cheese? What kind of pie is that? Who made it? Ask one more question and I will punch you in your mouth, knocking out all your fronts so you won’t be able to eat anything.
2. If you can’t walk or are missing any limbs, sit your butt down until someone makes your plate for you. Dinner time is not the time for you to be independent. Nibble on them pecans and walnuts to hold you over until someone makes you a plate.
3. If you have kids under the age of twelve, I will escort their little butts to the basement and bring their food down to them. They are not gonna tear my house up this year. Tell them that they are not allowed upstairs until it’s time for Uncle Butchie to start telling family stories about their mommas and papas. If they come upstairs for any reason except for that they are bleeding to death, I will tear their butts up and you better not ask why!
4. There is going to be one prayer for Thanksgiving dinner! JUST ONE! We do not care that you are thankful that your 13 year old daughter gave birth to a healthy baby or your nephew just got out of jail. The time limit for the prayer is one minute. If you are still talking after that one minute is up, you will feel something hard come across your lips and they will be swollen for approximately 20 minutes.
5. Finish everything on your plate before you go up for seconds! If you don’t, you will be asked to stay your greedy butt home next year!
6. BRING YOUR OWN TUPPERWARE!! Don’t let me catch you fixing yourself a plate in my good Tupperware knowing that I will never see it again! Furthermore, if you didn’t bring anything over, don’t let me catch you making a plate period or it will be a misunderstanding. And why are you making plates before you eat? You never bring a dish or offer a dime do you?
7. What you came with is what you should leave with!! Do not leave my house with anything that doesn’t belong to you. EVERYBODY WILL BE SUBJECTED TO A BODY SEARCH COMING AND GOING OUT OF MY DOMAIN!!!
8. Do not leave your kids so you can go hopping from house to house. This is not a DAYCARE CENTER ! There will be a kid-parent roll call every ten minutes. Any parent that is not present at the time of roll call, your child will be put outside until you come and get him or her. After 24 hours, I will call CPS!
9. BOOK YOUR HOTEL ROOM BEFORE YOU COME INTO TOWN!! There will be no sleeping over at my house! You are to come and eat dinner and go home or to your hotel room. EVERYBODY GETS KICKED OUT AT 11:00 pm. You will get a 15 minute warning bell ring.
10. Last but not least! ONE PLATE PER PERSON!! This is not a soup kitchen. I am not trying to feed your family until Christmas dinner! You will be supervised when you fix your plate. Anything over the appropriate amount will be charged to you before you leave. There will be a cash register at the door. Thanks to Cousin Alfred and his greedy family, we now have a credit card machine! So VISA and MASTERCARD are now being accepted. NO FOOD STAMPS OR ACCESS CARDS YET!
P.S.-All cell phones will be stored in a box so we can cut all texting and phone calls during the meal. Please do not come in here talking to ya boo who couldn’t make it or to the family member that wants a plate, but is either too lazy or has too much friction w/ the rest of the family to show.
Lamentations of the Father - by Ian Frazier
LAMENTATIONS OF THE FATHER
by Ian Frazier
Household Principles for Children from the Old Testament
Laws of Forbidden Places
Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright color and unknown provenance you may eat, but not in the living room. Of quiescently frozen dessert and of all frozen after-meal treats you may eat, but absolutely not in the living room.
Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein. Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage there you may not eat, neither may you drink. But if you are sick, and are lying down and watching something, then may you eat in the living room.
Laws When at Table
And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke.
Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away.
When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck: for you will be sent away.
When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you.
Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is.
And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that,that is why.
Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.
Laws Pertaining to Dessert
For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert.
But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert.
But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof.
And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.
On Screaming
Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault.
Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat it myself, yet do not die.
Concerning Face and Hands
Cast your countenance upward to the light, and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you; even to the very back of your head, there is rice thereon.
And in the breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner wonderful to see.
Only hold yourself still; hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be; and you shall not go hence until I have done.
Various Other Laws, Statutes, and Ordinances
Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of the bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub yourself against cars, not against any building; nor eat sand.
Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not the humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape.
Thus endeth the lesson.
by Ian Frazier
Household Principles for Children from the Old Testament
Laws of Forbidden Places
Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cloven-hoofed animal, plain or with cheese, you may eat, but not in the living room. Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright color and unknown provenance you may eat, but not in the living room. Of quiescently frozen dessert and of all frozen after-meal treats you may eat, but absolutely not in the living room.
Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein. Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage there you may not eat, neither may you drink. But if you are sick, and are lying down and watching something, then may you eat in the living room.
Laws When at Table
And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke.
Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away.
When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck: for you will be sent away.
When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you.
Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is.
And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that,that is why.
Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.
Laws Pertaining to Dessert
For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert.
But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert.
But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof.
And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.
On Screaming
Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault.
Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat it myself, yet do not die.
Concerning Face and Hands
Cast your countenance upward to the light, and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you; even to the very back of your head, there is rice thereon.
And in the breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner wonderful to see.
Only hold yourself still; hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be; and you shall not go hence until I have done.
Various Other Laws, Statutes, and Ordinances
Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of the bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub yourself against cars, not against any building; nor eat sand.
Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not the humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014
Bitching in the Kitchen
Alright, I'm officially aggravated. Has anyone noticed the changes in Southern Living and Taste of Home Magazines? The recipes now are crappy. I don't want a <yuk> strawberry spinach <gak> salad with <gulk gulk> poppy seed dressing. I want nanner pudding' and mac-n-cheese. I want that every month, just print the same recipe and put it on a different plate and I'm happy. Taste of Home recently did a bait and switch. They put 5 different cheesecakes on the cover and most of the pages were filled with the culinary equivalent of vegetarian porn.
Just Sayin'...
If you give me bath salts for Christmas I may strip naked, run in traffic, beat your ass, then attempt to eat your face. Just saying. (Oh and the same goes for socks too).
Cat Reporter
Woke up this morning with my cat staring me down like a court reporter busily typing something on the quilt. Worried that I may have been talking in my sleep, I was relieved to find the printout was just a bunch of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz's.
The Great Sleepover Escape
When I was about 6 years old I spent the night with my best friend, Marie. Marie lived across the street from our house. We were having fun and enjoying our sleep over and then it was time for bed. Marie's mother was a very nice woman named Ruby. She came to put us to bed and was being friendly and playful as she tucked us in. I remember her smiling sweetly as she said "...and tomorrow morning were going to get up and I'm going to make y'all a big pancake breakfast!"
Terror struck to the heart of me when she said this. I knew for a fact that their family always ate pancakes with maple syrup while our family always used cane syrup. I hated maple syrup with a passion!! As Marie drifted off to sleep, I lied awake worrying about whether Miss Ruby would make me eat everything on my plate at breakfast.
I was very shy in those days and not good at all when it came to talking to adults about my likes and dislikes. Besides I was a guest in their house and it would seem rude to refuse to eat their godawful (achh!) maple syrup.
Next to Marie's room was the living room where her father sat dozing in his big chair while watching the late show. I lay there until I heard him snoring. I knew the only way to avoid the embarrassment of refusing to eat maple syrup or worse yet, puking up maple syrup pancakes in front of my friend's family was to escape the sleepover.
I quietly tip-toed ninja-like past her sleeping father and made my way to the back door where I was less likely to be caught. I was just barely able to reach the lock on the door but I finally did and made it out. I left the door open because I was too scared someone might hear if I closed it.
I made my escape wearing my pink ruffled silky pant-suit style pajamas (looked like a mini Zsa Zsa Gabor outfit). I ran quickly across the street to my house. Luckily our door was always unlocked back then. I believe it was probably around midnight, as everyone was asleep in our house too when I got home. I went upstairs and slept in my own bed.
I awoke early and stayed upstairs because I knew Mama would want to know what I was doing at home. I was so scared I was going to be in trouble for running away in the middle of the night. About 7:00 am the phone rang and I quickly answered it. It was Marie's father. He told me they were worried when they awoke and found me gone. (Looking back now, I can only imagine the fear they must have felt finding the back door wide open and a six year old neighbor's kid missing.) I quickly thought up a lie and told him my tummy had started hurting and I came home early in the morning. He said he was just glad to know I was at home and that I was alright.
I went downstairs and told Mama the same thing. She said "Aw, poor wittle ting. And I was just about to start some pancakes". Pancakes? Oh well, I feel okay enough to have some pancakes. Do we have cane syrup?
No matter how much I love my friends or how much I thought I really wanted to go out into the world and seek adventures in foreign locales, I have to admit, everything's always better at home.
Puppets in the Pulpit
I grew up Catholic and my best friend, Marie, was Baptist. She attended a large Baptist church in our neighborhood which had a "Christian Life Center" attached to it. At the CLC they had a pool, a gym, a large game room with pool tables, foosball and air hockey tables. They had a bowling alley, snack machines, and they even allowed roller skating on the gym floor.
At the Catholic church we attended, we had a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) Hall. You had to attend Catholic school to use it. We were Public (ie; attended public school instead of Catholic school). The Catholic church had talked our parents into being fruitful and multiplying their asses off to the tune of ten kids, then they couldn't afford to send their kids to catholic school because, (get this) there were too many of them! Anyway as far as I could tell all they did in the CYO Hall was play volleyball. And you weren't allowed to wear real shoes on their gym floors, much less roller skates. Heaven forbid you leave a scuff mark.
Well, our Mama didn't mind where we got our bible teaching, so we were allowed to attend Wednesday night service at the Baptist church. If you attended Wednesday night service, you got to go SWIMMING aftwerwards. Jesus must've thought this up himself! It was a brilliant way to get kids to go to church.
Marie's Dad used to drive Marie and our friends Francesca and Lynn to the church on Wednesday nights for praying and swimming. When we hit about junior high, well, we started to backslide a little bit. One night Francesca and I decided to ditch the service and just show up for the swimming. My friends Marie (the Baptist) and Lynn were too chicken to join us so they stayed in the sanctuary for the service.
Francesca and I decided to explore the church a bit. We sneaked down hallways and peeked in Sunday school classrooms, offices, a kitchen and various other rooms. We then came upon the choir rooms.
This was a large church with a very large choir. We went into the choir rehearsal rooms which led to the choir dressing room filled with extra robes and empty hangers dangling in open closets. While the choir members were raising their voices on the risers behind the Pastor, we crept through two curious doors we found.
Upon opening the doors we realized we could hear the sound of the choir much louder and clearer. Below each door, steps went down to a tiled floor with a drain in it. It kind of looked like a shower room. We paused for a moment at opposite ends of the room and turned our heads up and to the side to behold what appeared to be a window. Through the window we could see the tops of the choir member's heads as they stood to sing praises to God.
We looked across and smiled at each other when we realized this was the Baptismal font. We slowly lowered our heads as not to be seen by the congregation. We tiptoed down the steps into the baptismal. As the hymn ended and the pastor began the opening remarks of his sermon, we decided to peak our heads up (ala Kilroy was here) to see if we could see our friends in the sanctuary.
We started to chicken out and quickly ducked back down. But we knew the opportunity to have some fun with this was just too good to pass up. Our fear of being seen was really of being "identified" and having our parents told or being kicked out and not allowed to swim. So we decided we need not show our faces.
As Marie and Lynn sat in their pew, a beach towel under their arm and swimsuit bows resting on the napes of their necks, they wondered where we could have wondered off too. Suddenly Marie was caught off guard by the urgent thwack of Lynn's hand hitting her shoulder. Marie quickly looked at Lynn and saw her with mouth agape and eyes glued forward. Marie looked ahead and quickly muttered "Oh shit!" as she began shrinking in the pew and raising a hymnal to cover her face.
On the alter in front of them, the Pastor was passionately delivering his sermon, behind him the choir sat quietly nodding their agreement to his every syllable and just beyond the choir the large baptismal window had suddenly become stage to the first Southern Baptist Hand Puppet Show ever witnessed by the congregation. The bare hand puppets began mouthing words and taking turns dunking each other in the baptismal. They sang a few quick wide-mouthed hymns and exited the stage with a grand old vaudeville style slanted shuffle.
Franseca and I quickly exited and made a run for it back to the ladies room of the sanctuary, partly to establish an alibi and partly because we were about to pee our pants from laughing so hard. We still got to swim and were never found out.
I still have to wonder what it's going to be like on judgment day when God asks me to explain this. Y'all keep me in your prayers.
Rainy Day Dares
My friends and I loved playing in the rain when we were kids. We loved to stand by the curb and let passing cars spray us with water. We would actually wave and holler to cars to splash us. This was great fun for us. We lived near a street that had a large dip in the middle that always pooled a good bit of standing water during our frequent summer thunderstorms.
One particular day while waiting on a car to come along to splash us, one of the gang, Francesca, dared us to put our heads under the water. Mind you this was a giant mud puddle on a well traveled city street complete with swishing and swirling leaves, grass, ants, cigarette butts and debris of all types. But not being ones to back down from a dare, myself and Lynn (Francesca's younger sister) of course, went for it.
When no cars were in sight, we kneeled on the curb, held our breath, squeezed our eyes shut tight and completely submerged our heads up to our necks into the dirty water. We emerged triumphant with twigs and leaves stuck to our hair.
We laughed our butts off at ourselves. Those were always the best laughs. Laughing at ourselves and having our friends there to laugh with you and at you. Great memories.
One particular day while waiting on a car to come along to splash us, one of the gang, Francesca, dared us to put our heads under the water. Mind you this was a giant mud puddle on a well traveled city street complete with swishing and swirling leaves, grass, ants, cigarette butts and debris of all types. But not being ones to back down from a dare, myself and Lynn (Francesca's younger sister) of course, went for it.
When no cars were in sight, we kneeled on the curb, held our breath, squeezed our eyes shut tight and completely submerged our heads up to our necks into the dirty water. We emerged triumphant with twigs and leaves stuck to our hair.
We laughed our butts off at ourselves. Those were always the best laughs. Laughing at ourselves and having our friends there to laugh with you and at you. Great memories.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Movie Review: Heaven is For Real
HEAVEN IS FOR REAL :
Went to see "Heaven is for Real" last week. I had a hard time focusing on the movie due to the idiot family that sat behind us and were obviously all eating their individual THANKSGIVING DINNERS during the movie. I can understand having to hear a little popcorn crunching and coke slurping during a movie but after a while you finish it, right? Not Big Mamou and her eight super-sized kids. They arrived late and proceeded to suck, slurp, slop, gnaw, crunch, and munch their way through the entire movie.
They also had some problems getting their happy little asses comfortable in their seats because they kicked, jiggled, jostled, and knee-ed,("kneed" didn't look right, ok?) the back of our seats all through the movie. This being a nice family friendly Christian movie I felt it would be frowned upon to turn around and scream "Will y'all knock it off, I can't hear the goddamned movie?!!!!"
So I guess my review is really about the family behind me. Because I don't have a clue what was happening on the screen. Some pucker-lipped kid kept saying things to freak his family out and his Dad kept looking in on him when he slept. I think he wanted the four year old to write him a book because they seemed to be always broke, despite the fact that they lived in a gigantic farmhouse that looked reallllllllly expensive.
Whatever, the movie was ok but that family really pissed me off.
The end ~~
Went to see "Heaven is for Real" last week. I had a hard time focusing on the movie due to the idiot family that sat behind us and were obviously all eating their individual THANKSGIVING DINNERS during the movie. I can understand having to hear a little popcorn crunching and coke slurping during a movie but after a while you finish it, right? Not Big Mamou and her eight super-sized kids. They arrived late and proceeded to suck, slurp, slop, gnaw, crunch, and munch their way through the entire movie.
They also had some problems getting their happy little asses comfortable in their seats because they kicked, jiggled, jostled, and knee-ed,("kneed" didn't look right, ok?) the back of our seats all through the movie. This being a nice family friendly Christian movie I felt it would be frowned upon to turn around and scream "Will y'all knock it off, I can't hear the goddamned movie?!!!!"
So I guess my review is really about the family behind me. Because I don't have a clue what was happening on the screen. Some pucker-lipped kid kept saying things to freak his family out and his Dad kept looking in on him when he slept. I think he wanted the four year old to write him a book because they seemed to be always broke, despite the fact that they lived in a gigantic farmhouse that looked reallllllllly expensive.
Whatever, the movie was ok but that family really pissed me off.
The end ~~
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