Cerebrate Good Times

Okay, let’s talk about how we’re all tremendously fat and unhealthy. Everyone wants a magic diet pill to lose weight. But there are multiple ways to attack the problem. Losing weight is just what you’d need to do after the damage was done. What about making healthy foods taste better? I’d love to eat mostly vegetables, but I’m no good at cooking them, and they will never be as delicious as a steak with a milkshake chaser. So why can’t science make broccoli taste like chocolate? Science, get on that. Or we could go one step further and modify our brains to like healthy food, instead of just sweet, sweet, sugar. That would be even more efficient. I’m sure if we took some of the billions of dollars spent on treating obesity and related health problems and put it toward a little brain tinkering, we could figure something out. Scientists, suck in that gut so you can reach the test tubes!

I'm not looking up the spelling to see if it's correct. But sometimes it’s fun to take pleasure in others’ misery. What I really want to see, just once, is one of the people driving like an idiot on the freeway every day actually get pulled over. I've never seen it yet. Or how about someone I know, whom I overheard talking about how easy it is to know where the police will be, and how he can’t understand how anyone gets pulled over? Can’t he get pulled over, please? But that’s my thing. What kind of misery would you like to see others suffer?

I feel like I've been complaining a lot lately. So let's get started. Last weekend we went down to southern Utah for the wedding of Katie's sister. On Friday we packed up the car, got in and... the car wouldn't start. Eventually we sorted out that the battery had been drained the night before, when Katie had the doors open for a long time vacuuming it. So I got it  jump-started it, and we were off. Everything went fine until that night, when we finally got the kids to sleep in the motel room (which is always a challenge). I didn't get much sleep because I was in the bed with Allison, and she rolled around all night. In addition, there was a screaming baby in the room next to us that was apparently up all night too. The next day we discovered that it was in fact screaming triplets. And the people kept their door open all morning to more effectively share the joy with the world. The wedding itself went fine, and they had a nice outdoor reception with beautiful weather...

Okay, in terms of "the good of humanity" and all that, it's important to cure diseases like cancer. But if you want to help improve the quality of life for a larger portion of the population, and invigorate the economy, someone please figure out a way to safely tranquilize children at night. Whoever does that will become a billionaire overnight, I guarantee.

I love the variety of life. It’s fascinating to me how many different ways there are to keep me from sleeping at night. Sometimes I’m sick, and there’s an endless variety of symptoms that can keep me awake, from a cough to congestion to a sunburn. Sometimes, as was the case last night, I’m perfectly fine but everyone else is sick and the kids wake up every ten minutes. Sometimes they just don’t go to bed until really late. Sometimes the neighbors’ dogs won’t shut up. Sometimes there’s a thunderstorm. Sometimes I can’t get the temperature right. I really am amazed at the sheer number of possibilities, and sometimes I just laugh at whatever it is on a given day.

[caption id="attachment_1568" align="aligncenter" width="577" caption="WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MORE EARL GREY?!?!"] [/caption]

Sometimes when I am tired I say extra strange things. Today I asked a coworker what he was eating, and he said, "Just a gumdrop." Here is how I replied. " Just a gumdrop? You're talking about one of the great foundational creations of the American confectionary industry, upon whose shoulders stand such giants as Jelly Bellies and gummy worms! So show some respect!" The funny thing is that I don't even really care about gumdrops one way or the other.

When you were in school, did you ever do that project where you build a bridge out of paper and see how many books you can put on it before it breaks? Well, I didn’t. But I understand the concept. And sometimes, when it’s been a hard week or two (or six years), I feel a little bit like that bridge. Once in a while it’s mental, when work or other responsibilities pile up, but for me it’s more often physical. Usually it’s lack of sleep. I’ve been a parent long enough to be able to shrug off bad nights here and there without trouble, but several nights of five interrupted hours or less starts to add up. And then, due to stubbornness (which is often indistinguishable from stupidity), I keep up with my running schedule, which lately has had me doing 12 to 14 mile runs on Saturdays in addition to a couple shorter weekday runs. Anyway, lately I feel a bit like I’m watching that paper bridge from a distance with a morbid curiosity, wondering when the whole thing will collapse under the weight ...

Last night as I was trying to get Allison to sleep, this thought came into my head: We really need more products named "pelican."

Okay, someone is playing a joke on me. My adversarial relationship with sleep is familiar to anyone who is a parent. It's just a tradeoff we make for the joy (and frustration, and constant confusion) of raising children. And I’ve come to accept that. What I can’t come to terms with, however, is what my brain does on the rare occasion when I am able to get to bed at a decent time, as was the case Sunday night. When that happens, and I wish I were kidding here, I get so excited about the potential for 8 hours of sleep that the excitement keeps me awake. It just seems supremely unfair.

... I'm going to get myself some spats, just to try them out.

Okay, this bugs me. Here's a banner ad I've seen around a few times, presumably for some show I don't watch. It's not easy to notice, at least for those of use used to names like John and Sarah, but they spell her name two different ways in the ad, Pavarti and Parvati. Maybe I should "message her" to tell her not to trust CBS if they can't even spell her name right.

Last night was one of those nights when Allison decided to be up for several hours, and I was trying to think of a good way to describe the state of my brain. So far the best analogy I can come up with is that if my brain were a city, and the traffic represented my thoughts, all the stoplights would be flashing red and green in unusual combinations, causing accidents everywhere and generally slowing things down to a crawl.

This morning on my way to work I was thinking how I really don't mind leaving a few minutes early to beat some of the traffic. And then a funny thought struck me: The key to balancing your work life and your home life is to hate your job. The idea is that if you love your job you will want to spend more time there than is necessary, at the expense of your family. But on the other hand, if you hate your job you will probably spend too little time there to be effective, so I realized that doesn't really work either. So the amended maxim is this: The key to balancing your work life and your home life is to feel okay about your job but not to love it too much. Then you don't mind going to work, but you're happy to pack up at the end of the day and go home.

Last night we had the most impressive thunderstorm I have ever seen. It all started a little before midnight, as I was trying to get to sleep. Bright flashes of lightning kept interrupting my descent into slumber, at a rate of several per minute. There was no thunder, though, at least for a while. As the storm crept closer we began to hear low rumblings, and the lightning became even more intense. I should have counted the flashes, but they were often interrupting each other, and the thunder was too. I kept thinking maybe the center of the storm had passed, when a huge peal of thunder would crash overhead. We opened the blinds for a while and just watched the show. The amazing thing was that the kids didn't wake up even though it lasted for an hour, with a few really deafening crashes. I always wondered how much electricity we could get from lightning, if it were possible to capture safely. According to one random website I just found, "One storm can discharge enough energy to...

Allison has a few videos she likes to watch (yes, we like to start their education early), one of which is the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. At first, I thought it had some interesting similarities to Disney's The Lion King , what with Rudolph running away to grow up, then return triumphant. But at any rate, there are some interesting lessons we can learn from the story: 1. If your children are born different, make sure you change them so they fit in. 2. Running away from your problems is a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with them. 3. If you don't fit in, you're worthless. 4. If someone bullies you, it's only fair to pull out all their teeth and turn them into a slave. That's the great thing about older shows. They always have a message to share.

Okay, I can’t decide if this idea would save the world or ruin it, but I don’t think there’s a middle ground. You know that feeling you have when you get something new, and it’s great, but over time it gradually fades and you want to replace it with something newer? What if we identified that the feeling is caused by a particular chemical secreted by your brain, and we could synthesize it? All of a sudden people wouldn’t buy a new car every couple of years, which would hurt companies but really cut down on how deeply in debt everyone was. We’d probably be slightly less mean toward each other, too. So, would this idea save us or destroy us?

I was thinking about how we all assume that older people are out of touch with current technology. (“What’s a Twitter?”) We like to laugh a little bit about how we know how to use our smartphones to do our taxes, while our grandparents never could get the hang of using a VCR. But I think as we grow older we’ll find ourselves in an even worse position than older folks today. I don’t know whether the Singularity will ever happen, but it’s pretty easy to see the accelerated growth of technological development. Whereas they look at a computer and think, “Okay, this is like a television that connects to that internet thingy,” we won’t even have a beginning point of reference to conceptualize the devices like the portable boxes that raise your consciousness to another level, or the floating orbs that are beings of pure thought. We will be totally lost. So they’ll probably just plug our brains into the Matrix, so we old fogeys can pretend it’s still 1999 and party accordingly.

Here's a chat I had this morning with my friend Rob Wells . me:  I'm sure they'll call any minute robisonwells:  I'm sure you'll get a punch in the neck any minute (because I hired a guy) me:  I'll do it for half the price robisonwells:  no, when hiring a hitman, I find it best to avoid possible conflicts of interests. You know, I'm all about ethics. me:  Why would you hire a hitman just to punch me? That's like hiring a doctor to apply a band-aid. robisonwells:  because I take pride in my work, no matter how small the job also, when looking to hire someone to punch someone in the neck, your options are pretty limited. me:  He bruised his knuckle on my vertebra. We're going to try again. Much better. robisonwells:  oh goof good me:  But he says he's going to charge you for the extra punch robisonwells:  but, oh goof also that hitman, he's such a goof!!! me:  So how much am I supposed to tip him? These situations are always so awkward. robison...

Okay, I know that "baby Hitler" jokes shouldn't be at all funny, but come on...