Rambling Josh

Another semester is in the gradebook. The book told various academic stories, some ending in triumph, some in tragedy, and most lingering somewhere in between. The letters associated with each of these academic stories, the A’s down to the F’s, were laid in place by various human stories.

Stories of students finding meaning and purpose in their course work, and in their lives. Stories of students finding that college wasn’t for them. Stories of students just doing what they have to do to get by, and move a little closer to a yet to be determined destination. These stories, in all there forms, replay themselves year-after-year, and most likely always will.

Over the course of every semester a few students go AWOL academically. Some show up again a few weeks before finals with a new found urgency, asking…begging, “What can I do to pass this class?” A question that always brings forth a flood of sarcastic comments that make my right eye twitch as I struggle to contain them. My left eye is decidedly lazy, and gazes upon the student with detached disinterest.

Much as one would gaze upon anyone asking you what the very least amount of thought and effort is that they must put into something that you have put a tremendous amount of thought and effort into creating. Once the right eye stops twitching, I generally settle on detached disinterest…and mild sarcasm…so as not to complete disappoint my right eye and my mom.

Speaking of my mom, on December 18th, her and my dad (as far as I know), celebrated their 47th wedding anniversary. 47-years…that’s a long time to live in close proximity to the same human. That’s a year longer than I’ve been alive, well seven months, but who’s counting. Thank you Mom and Dad for the love story you’ve written over the years. It’s been an inspiration and a pleasure to be a part of.

Happy holidays everyone, you won’t be hearing from me again until next year, unless my wife has “plans” for me over the holidays. As my high school shop teacher, Leonard Savelkoul, once said, “We’re all alone down here, and “accidents” happen in the shop.” I would like to acknowledge the fact that if it weren’t for my wife’s planning, and her love of the Christmas season, many of our family and friends would get nothing from our household. No cookies, no cards, no gifts…no nothing.

It’s not that I don’t like the holidays, or my family and friends. I don’t really know what it is? Maybe it’s the fact that it takes me a good while to come to terms with the memories of Christmas past, before I can fully enjoy Christmas present? Whatever the reason, I am thankful for the tremendous thought and effort my wife puts into making the holidays special.

Maybe the grief I give my wife over the Hallmark Christmas movies she loves so much is founded in my own deep seeded feelings of insecure holiday jolliness? Or…maybe they are highly predictable sapfests, acted out by Hollywood flunkies who most likely cry mournful tears of regret for their once promising acting career each time the director yells “cut”. Exceedingly good looking Hollywood flunkies, with perfect hair and teeth, draped in form fitting flannel and Santa hats, but flunkies just the same. Maybe I should have quit while I was ahead? So it goes.

Each of us plays a part in a story of some sort. I hope you’re inspired to shoot for an “A” in yours. Happy Holidays.

Happy December. Many of you are most likely treading around, elf ears deep, in the rising tide of the holiday season, lashing yule logs together to stay afloat. Next month that tide will subside, and we’ll give a new year a go. This ebb and flow seems slow in the moment, but quite fleeting when one turns their attention towards all that has come and gone.

My wife and I started a family tradition, back when the kids were little, of venturing out into the Black Hills and cutting down our Christmas tree. With a Christmas tree permit of course. The authorities kick down your door and tear a wing off of your angel for a first offense Christmas tree poaching.

I’m not sure if we set out to start a family tradition at the time, or if it was just something we did once, and kept doing year-after-year? This year, like each of those past years, we went out into the Black Hills and found our Christmas tree. This year, unlike each of those past years, the “we” consisted of Dawn, myself, and our dog Pre. The kids are off “adulting”, revealing yet another territory our empty nest has encompassed. So it goes.

Before you get too far along in imagining us forlornly shuffling through the woods, I should inform you that a few years back the Richter family added this tradition as well, and began joining us for their own Christmas tree hunt. As always, Dawn and I enjoyed the company of my good friend Paul, his wife Jodi, and their four kids.

Paul and Jodi’s children haven’t fled to adulthood yet, so they can help Dawn and I deal with this now, and we’ll help them deal with it later. When their kids ditch them and the family traditions they’ve worked so hard to carry on through the years, we’ll be there. Four old people shuffling through the woods in search of Christmas past. I think I just wrote the plot to a Hallmark Christmas special.

I’ve decorated quite a few Christmas trees in my day, but this one proved to be the most difficult yet. Each ornament I took from the box of decorations had a memory attached to it, and I struggled with the weight of those memories. Dawn put a positive spin on the event, calling it our “honeymoon tree”, and we helped each other navigate yet another change in our lives.

Dawn suggested we watch a Christmas movie once the tree was properly festooned with memories from Christmas past. I was in the mood to wallow a bit longer in the past, and we watched home videos from Christmas 2002. I realized this had the potential of kicking me while I was down, but surprisingly, I found it quite cathartic. As I watched seven-year-old Sierra and three-year-old Jackson bounce around on screen, I felt some of that heaviness lift, and be replaced with gratitude.

The year 2002, sixteen short years ago (for the math impaired). Seems like you should be able to turn around and find everything and everyone it held not much more than an arm’s length away, but I found much of it has drifted beyond the capabilities of my reach.

What has changed in your life since 2002? I would imagine there’s been some good, and there’s been some bad, as that seems to be the way of things. There’s certainly nothing wrong with pausing our forward momentum to honor our memories with a few tears now and then, but that trees not going to decorate itself. Forward we must go.

Happy Thanksgiving. I’m in week 14 of our 16 week fall semester, that time of the semester when niceties are approaching their limits and the students and instructors have had enough of one another. Students are beginning to concern themselves with the final projects they were told to concern themselves with back in week one. Back in week one when I told them, “the semester goes fast, don’t put this off until week 14”…so it goes. I’d be surprised if went any other way.

There’s always a few of those high achiever type students, who consider anything less than 100% on any and all assignments a failure, and, of course, a few more students who consider anything not failing as “good enough”. Making these two ends of the academic ambition scale do group work together is a diabolical little game I like to play. A game played with the hope that both parties will come away with some life-lessons, a smidge of wisdom, and the same number of teeth they started the project with.

“Hope”, a four-letter word that often inadvertently winds up becoming the precursor to a variety of other four-letter words. Some of which I learned while handing my dad the tool he hadn’t hoped for while he was lying on the gravel in the driveway, wedged under whichever vehicle needed to be tinkered on that particular day.

“Tinkered” seems a bit too jovial of a word to describe any of the driveway automotive repairs I witnessed. You would be surprised how accurately you can judge the irritation level of someone just by observing the “attitude” of their cowboy boots sticking out from under a car. Perhaps I should have been less observant of dad’s “angry” Tony Lama’s, and a bit more focused on my tool gopher task. Group work…father and son tinkering on the car in the driveway…oh the lessons learned.

Dad learned that a career as an auto mechanic was not in the cards for his eldest son, and I learned that, with the proper motivation, dad, and his miffed Tony Lama’s, could slide out from under a car, across gravel, with impressive expedience and nary a hint of discomfort. “Ohhh, that wrench. Why didn’t you say something? I’m just standing here, you were all comfy in the gravel under the car.” Those words knew better than to move from my mind to my mouth.

There’s a meme that I share with my students at the beginning of group projects, “When I die, I want the people I did group projects with to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time.” The potential for group work to go south is quite high, but when it works it’s quite gratifying for all involved. Keep that in mind as preparations for all the holiday gatherings begin to unfold.

Be helpful. Do what you can, when you can, for everyone you can. Dazzle your host and hostess, leave them hopeful that you and your ugly sweater (or whatever you call your date) will come again.

Happy Holidays.

A few weeks back, a clan of sorts convened at our cabin in Montana for the First Annual Colter Wall Singing Bee and general merriment. If you don’t know who Colter Wall is, take a stroll through YouTube, you might fancy his music. If you don’t know what general merriment entails, your clan has failed you, find a new clan.

Or, perhaps, and more likely, you have failed your clan? Perhaps, your presence scatters general merriment hither and yon, smothering it into a docile, dead-eyed, head nodding existence. How does one know if the clan or the individual is at fault for the absence of general merriment? As Robert Pirsig put it in his book, Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

This particular clan of seven people, and two dogs, holed up in an 18x20 one-room log cabin with no electricity, no cellular service, and no indoor plumbing for a few days on a cold and snowy October weekend. The clan was comprised of myself, our daughter Sierra, her “man friend” Troy, their friend Brittany, my brother Gabe, his friend and co-worker Terry Knutson, and Gabe’s brother-in-law Bradley Rosenquist. If any of these people shirked any duties, or called in sick during this time, I apologize for unraveling their stories.

Knowing how busy life can be, I sent the call out for this gathering a month or so in advance, to allow time for schedules to be bent and twisted a bit, if one was so inclined to do so. There were a few who weren’t able to make it work this time around, but the “First Annual” implies that a second annual may be forthcoming. For those that were willing, and/or able, to give up one of their yearly issued 52 weekends, I am quite grateful.

As the elder of the clan, there were times when I had to remove myself from the group gathered around the kitchen table to reload by the fire. In a one-room cabin you’re never too far removed from anything or anybody, but it was enjoyable to just sit and listen to the “youngsters” laugh and visit about everything and nothing. Good people. All with a firm grasp of the concept of general merriment.

Everyone departed on Sunday, but I had a few more days off, so I farted around the cabin until Tuesday. After a few days of late nights, singing, laughing, and what have you, I suddenly found myself alone by the fire, surrounded by silence. Within that silence I found myself wishing that the door of the cabin would suddenly swing open and everyone would jostle in, take their places around the table, and make the rafters roar once again. So it goes.

Times like this come and go so quickly, but the memories can be relied upon for as long as our memory allows. I look at the empty chairs surrounding the table and see them all, I sit in the flickering light of the fireplace and hear the laughter and music the cabin walls strained to contain. I lie in bed and smile as I recall the chorus of snores coming from all corners of the cabin. Snores of people that gave general merriment all they had, snores of a content clan.

I was doing laundry the other day, and I began to wonder what it is exactly that people who have a full-time staff of maids, chefs, butlers, nanny’s, personal assistants, spiritual advisors, chauffeurs, and the like, actually do all day every day? If anyone reading this has such a staff, please have one the previously mentioned folks give me a call. When your work is done of course.

I don’t care to talk to you personally, I’m sure you’re busy making business for your staff. Sweating in your socks, using more forks than are necessary, not changing the toilet paper roll…making work for others is a lot of work. Come to think of it, that way of life isn’t far removed from the way of life most children lead. Those little tyrants just have a smaller staff to command. Mom and/or Dad.

Maybe that comparison is telling as to just what people with a full personal staff do all day? Spill juice on the couch, eat crayons, yell a lot, and lose their mind when there aren’t any hotdogs cut-up in the macaroni and cheese. They don’t concern themselves with toilet paper either, we’ve got that end covered as well.

I have no sense of smell, for those that do crossword puzzles or play Scrabble, the medical term for it is anosmia, might get you a win someday. Anyway, when our children were diaper age, and said diaper was at or beyond its intended capacity of digested macaroni and cheese (no hotdogs), my wife would sometimes say, “Oooh…this is bad one. You can have it, you can’t smell.”

I didn’t argue (much), it was the least I could do after witnessing the “miracle” of childbirth. The real miracle is that women hang around the likes of us men folk after enduring something like that. I’d have ran off and joined the circus, cleaning monkey cages and laundering their little outfits. On second thought, that’s pretty much what happened. Except the monkey cages probably would have been nicer than our first apartment. So it goes.

Back to my harrowing story of macaroni and cheese, diapers, and crippling anosmia. Having never experienced sniffing around something that seems should be left unsniffed, I have no reference for proper comparison, but my vision is fine. I assume that eventually you can “unsmell” something you wished you hadn’t had to smell, but it’s been about 20 years, and I still can’t “unsee” what I wished I hadn’t had to see. As my dad always says, “Wish in one hand…..”

All these things we “get” to do for our little miracles, are not things I’d pay someone else to do for me. For one, I’d feel so ashamed of myself for them having to do some of those things while I perused my ascot collection, that I’d have to fire them. The kid would have a fresh diaper to work with, but the nanny would be out of job. Maybe that’s what these people do with their time? Hire and fire diaper changers, and buy ascots.

I miss most everything that came with being a dad to little one’s…most everything.

On September 24th my wife and I celebrated our 24th year of “being an item”. It was homecoming week 1994 at Northern State University, Gypsy Days as it’s called, when we shared our first dance at The Zoo Bar. That night may have been our first dance, but we had known each other for a few years, as we were both biology majors and had several classes together.

One class, I believe it was invertebrate zoology, we ended up assigned to the same lab table, which improved my attendance for that course significantly. There wasn’t much of a correlation between my perfect attendance and my grade, which was more than a few letters below perfect. I was there in body, but I found her much more captivating than anything Dr. Wright was attempting to get into my head.

Dawn, on the other hand, was a serious student who worked hard to achieve the best grades she could in every class she took. A very foreign concept to me, but one I admired her for. I figured I’d just enjoy the time with her while I could, keep providing a bit of comedy relief at our lab table, simply because I liked to see her laugh. That would have to suffice, because it was obvious she was in a league far removed from the one I was bumbling around in.

A year or so later, I was in danger of failing college algebra, actually I was failing college algebra, and Dawn agreed to put her patients and sanity to the test, and attempt to tutor the untutorable. If there’s a place in your brain responsible for comprehending math, that place doesn’t exist in my head, or it was shoved aside to make room for song lyrics, movie quotes, and useless trivia. So it goes.

We would meet in the library a few nights a week, apparently that’s where serious students go to do serious studying, and she would point out the errors in my mathematical ways. She did a lot of pointing, but the lyrics, quotes, and trivia refused to concede any ground. As Merle Haggard once sang, “mamma tried”. She’s stubborn, and like Sisyphus, she pushed and pushed and pushed, but my brain kept rolling back down, leaving a wake of mangled, unrecognizable, algebraic equations in its path.

I got a solid “D” in that class. I’m not sure if the professor, a kindly old man, was too tired to fail me and face the futility of the matter for another semester, or if my tutor came through? I’d like to think Dawn came through for me, just as she has every day since.

You never know where life is going to take you, or what it has in store for you once you get there. It took me, in my 58' Chevy Biscayne, south out my little town to Aberdeen, South Dakota. It took me to Northern State University, where 24-years ago I put on a toga to celebrate homecoming (as any self-respecting college student should do). It took me to The Zoo Bar. It took me to where our dance began.

I propose that at the conclusion of any workplace meeting a vote should be taken to determine if those subjected to the meeting found it useful in any way. In any way, large or small, did the meeting contribute to your life?

If the predominate response is “I found the meeting to be quite informative and useful” fair enough…doubtful, but fair enough. But, if the response is “as a result of this meeting I am no wiser, merely an hour older” then whomever was responsible for that meeting must face consequences. Consequences that will dissuade them from subjecting others to such soul sucking drudgery again.

Although moderately justifiable, I’m not proposing that they be subjected to any form of physical punishment or public ridicule. This may offer short-term satisfaction, but as we’ve seen time and time again, in the long-term, only serves to fuel villainous motivation for revenge. Basically, the premise for the majority of movies, television shows, and dictatorships.

The consequences I am suggesting to dissuade people from stealing time from others, and failing to replace that stolen time with anything of worth, purpose, or value, would require the thief or thieves to give an hour of their pay, and an hour of their vacation time, to each person subjected to the uselessness.

I work at a college, and we are only a month into the school year, but if my proposal were instituted, I would already have accrued enough time and money to take the rest of the year off. I keep hoping that one day I will stroll out of a meeting with a spring in my step, my brain dripping with fresh insight, motivated and invigorated by the pearls of wisdom bestowed upon me. I keep hoping…for over 20 years…I keep hoping.

In the meantime, hope can find me at the back of the room, back where the lighting is bad, making it difficult for the den of thieves to see my eyes roll in contempt, or to even discern if my eyes are open at all. Back where I can laugh when I shouldn’t, and remain unresponsive, and unimpressed, when they think I should.

The problem is, the seats fill up quick back there, creating a bit of quandary that necessitates one arrive early to a meeting they don’t want to come to in the first place. So it goes. If the seats are all taken, you can always stand in the back of the room…counting bald spots to keep your mind from stalling out. Everyone will assume you’re one of those anti-sitting zealots, or you have hemorrhoids, either way, they’ll leave you alone.

Time is precious, and those that take it indiscriminately should pay for their crime. Join the fight against time thievery in the workplace. See your local representative at the next useless meeting. They can be found at the back of the room. If you are in charge of scheduling meetings, don’t, the revolution begins with you.

Dawn and I have been empty nesters for a whole two weeks now, but it feels closer to forever since all of us were occupying the same space in life. I’ve been told “it’ll get better” by parents that have been there, but like the well-meaning people that tell you “you’re going to miss it” when you’re young family has you tattered around the edges, it’s of little comfort.

Maybe I don’t want it to get better. Maybe I hope that I will always miss it. Maybe I hope that tears will always well up a bit when reminders of that stretch of time present themselves. There are reminders everywhere, and they present themselves often, but that doesn’t mean my cheeks are doomed to perpetual tracks of mascara.

The emotional response to the reminders littered about is varied. Pride, joy, delight, a smirk, a smile, and yes, a tear on occasion. I don’t know if this will always be the case. If I’ve learned anything raising two kids, is that there is a lot I didn’t, and still don’t know. I suppose life would be a bit boring if we did know it all. We’d all want to be politicians.

If we knew exactly what would bring us meaning, would it be as meaningful? I think we can mindfully pursue it, but it’ll grab ahold of us on its own accord. I often think I know what I need, but more and more, I realize that I am often mistaken. So it goes.

That’s sort of the overarching theme of parenthood…often mistaken. Often mistaken, but generally, always well meaning. We’re only human (most of us).

Speaking of humans, it seems that each of the changes brought about over the years, from the day they were born to the day they ditched us in pursuit of adulthood (or at least freedom from the oppression of the adults in their “hood”), have made me a better human.

Not better than anyone else, but better than I was. Even if that “better” is not all that great, it’s still better, and better is good…or at least better.

I ask the college students in my classroom to have a bit of compassion for the oppressive tyrants they’ve left behind. To go easy on those rudderless helicopters that are spinning around a warehouse full of plastic trophies, photographs, dusty Lincoln Logs, and mounds of Disney VHS tapes. I assume their not listening, the wounds from their hard fought fight for freedom are still too fresh. They’re not listening now, but perhaps they’ll hear me later.

Yes, we miss the kids. We miss them, and mope around a bit from time to time, but we knew this was part of the deal. Well, we knew of it, now we know about it. The nest isn’t completely empty. We’re still here, and we look forward to the kids stopping by from time to time to fill us in on all the goings-on in their lives.

Just be sure to knock first. Feathers are optional in an empty nest.

It seems that when we read headlines, and sometimes even the corresponding article lingering hopefully below the headline, we are drawn to those that support what we believe or want to believe. Confirmation bias is difficult to overcome, and oft times it is operating quietly under the surface unbeknownst to the conscious portion of our monkey brain.

The other day I spied the headline “The Psychological Importance of Wasting Time” and felt a twinge of delight. I felt another delightful twinge when the article went on to dispel the “inbox zero” campaign that reared its ugly head a few years ago. The crux of “inbox zero” is just as the name implies…be sure your email inbox is at zero at the end of each day.

I tried this for a few days. It appealed to my anal retentive side, but apparently my procrastinator side is a bully and shut down the whole experiment. So, now I’m back to having mounds of emails in my inbox, and I don’t care, and finding an article that supported my not caring confirmed that I shouldn’t care.

Did I look for articles that supported the “inbox zero” movement? No, I had my answer, and I liked it. I also had time to waste, as my psychological wellbeing is important. Often questionable, but important just the same. If you intentionally waste time are you really wasting time? On the flipside, if you spontaneously waste time, who is to say what would have occurred in that timeframe would have been productive?

When I was a kid I had a whoopee-cushion, oh how I delighted in slipping it under couch cushions. Hours of fun. Well my brother, Jarvis, decided that simply sitting on my whoopee-cushion wasn’t enough. He never thought enough-was-enough. He jumped high in the air to get optimal whoopee out of my cushion.

The cushion made a noise, but not the noise that is music to the male species ears, it made a “popping” noise. A popping noise followed by my brother rolling off the deflated whoopee cushion clutching the backside of his Tough Skin jeans in pain. At least the whoopee-cushions last gasp was a good one.

That whoopee-cushion and I had had some good times together, and I wasn’t about to walk away from it now in its time of need. Once so full of life, it lay crumpled and lifeless, with a gaping hole in its hull. We had to move fast if there was to be any hope.

We hopped on our CoastKing bicycles and headed north to the Wheatland Oil Company. I knew the owner, LeOtis Olney, had patched a tire for my dad, I knew inner tubes are rubber, I knew whoopee-cushions are rubber, I knew LeOtis was my only hope.

I brought in the lifeless whoopee-cushion, and asked LeOtis if he could patch it. He smiled and said, “Let’s see what we can do.” We stood and intently watched as LeOtis took time out of his day to patch a whoopee-cushion. I guess that’s the beauty of growing up in a small town. Everyone goes above and beyond to help one another out…even if it may appear to be a waste of time.

LeOtis may have wasted some of his time that day, but he saved a whoopee-cushion, and he made an impression on a young boy that has lasted over 30 years. Thanks LeOtis, and thanks Lignite. They say it takes a village to raise an idiot…you did a fine job.

Time is odd. People are odd. The blink of time each of us get to breathe in and breathe out in the company of others attempting to do the same is life. Like the previously mentioned time and people, life is odd as well, but you all new that.

Hopefully you also know that if the breathe-in-and-breathe-out thing ceases to occur you should think (or even exclaim loudly into a telephone with a 911 operator at the other end), “That’s an odd way to try and keep living. I think this person needs help.”

We all need a little help from time-to-time. I once read that being helped makes us feel happy, and helping, although it doesn’t always make us happy in the immediate, lends meaning to our lives in the long run. Makes sense from a parent’s point of view.

Raising kids is no picnic, but when they grow up and leave you alone you feel like something meaningful might have occurred. There are plenty of picnics going on when you’re raising kids, avoid them, they won’t be a picnic. They will be you attempting to balance soggy paper plates in hurricane winds full of food your kids won’t eat because the potato salad touched the Jell-O.

Apparently the person that coined the phrase about something “not being a picnic” never took kids to a picnic, or was one of those psychopaths that says “yes” when the hostess at a restaurant says, “we have room on the patio if you would like to sit outside”.

These people should be avoided, or at the very least, not allowed to interact with the hostess at a restaurant with an option for outdoor dining (a.k.a. a picnic). I don’t have a problem with outdoor dining if it is in the dead of night, there isn’t a swamp forming at my seated parts, and I can’t spit queso blanco on a passing or parked car from my chair. I don’t feel as though those are unreasonable criteria for an outdoor dining experience.

A “dining experience”. Not sure I’ve ever had one of those. I’ve dined a time or two, I’ve had my fair share of experiences, but have these paths crossed? I suppose every single thing that occurs to us as we’re busy breathing in and out could qualify as an experience. Some good. Some bad. Some memorable. Some forgettable. Each lending meaning to the other.

Last year I made the proclamation that I was hanging up my cleats and putting my baseball career out of its misery. Turns out I lied. Actually, I didn’t lie, I was coerced into playing by my son, and teammate, Jackson. I’ve witnessed a steady decline in the opportunities for “play” with my son over the past nineteen years of his breathing in and out so I said “yes”, or at least I didn’t say “no”.

After each game, the physical discomfort expressed by my 46-year-old muscles attempting to do what they did many moons ago, didn’t make me very happy, but the season as a whole was meaningful.

I’ve driven Jackson to many practices and games over the years, but this year I rode with him, and I could feel a shift occur in who we are to each other. I will always be his dad, and he will always be my son, but the meaning of that relationship is evolving.

He may not be happy when it evolves into him changing my shorts, but perhaps he’ll find some meaning in lending his padre a hand…perhaps. Life is odd. So it goes.