Sour Mood

I'm cranky.  I didn't sleep well last night.  I made poor nutritional choices today (pie and cookies for lunch).  I worked hard in the yard and Griswolding my house and then cutting some branches off a tree at Mom and Dad's.

I put up the Christmas tree.  I hate that tree.  It's a cheap Wal-mart tree.  It sheds.  We used to get a real tree, but we stopped getting them because they shed.  Now I have an artificial tree that sheds.  I put on the lights.

The kids were supposed to hang ornaments.  They were goofing around, trying to juggle them.  They kept getting distracted.  I had to force them off their computers to take part.  Then the dog took a crap in the living room behind the couch.  At that point, I lost it.  Then my wife banished me up here.

She knows me.

She knows I'm tired.  She knows I've had too much sugar.  She knows the kids are being especially annoying.

Do other people get like this?  I see happy pictures on Facebook, and happy descriptions of trimming the tree.  I think I like literature with a darker tint because it helps me realize that yes, this does happen to other people.

The good news is that I will snap out of this.  I will be happier tomorrow, after a good night's sleep, after this sugar processes through my system.

When I'm in this kind of mood, Bukowski it probably best for me.  There was a guy who understood how the world could crap down the back of your neck sometimes.  He could see that, as much as we wish for the opposite to be true, Norman Rockwell moments are rare and brief.

This was the guy who wrote:

"It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?" 

I can completely identify with this idea.

He said much more.  I think I enjoyed Bukowski more when I was younger, when I needed the reassurance more that the world can be that way.  And that it was okay.  That it could be that way, but that it wasn't important.  There is an Eastern philosophy feel to his work.  He was in the world, very much in the world physically, but somehow he managed to keep himself at a certain level of remove from the world intellectually.  He was certainly an active participant emotionally as well, but had an awareness that kept him at a level of sanity, even at his most insane.  He was able to reflect.

The quote of his that most perfectly expresses this duality of intellect and emotion:

 "Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way."

I feel better.  Thank you, Hank.  His friends called him Hank, not Charles, which is the name he wrote under.  Thanks, Hank, for reminding me that even though I'm not perfect, no one is, or should wish to be.  We all have our moments.  And we all live through them.  Maybe my wife will let me come back downstairs now.

Critical Thinking

I substitute teach now.  Substitute teaching is easy, especially if done wrong.  If I just go in, take roll, allow the kids enough freedom to amuse themselves but not enough to cause each other bodily harm or violate school policy, I have an easy day.  If the teacher I'm substituting for actually left a substantial lesson plan, things get a little bit tougher.  I have to establish authority, set expectations, earn respect, and encourage and motivate students who may be more accustomed to substitutes who go with plan A.  A little tougher, but not much.  After all, it's not like I have to grade anything, or do any planning.

Which I hate.  I love planning lessons.  I like reading writing assignments.

So today I substituted, and things took a left turn.  The students were supposed to go to a lab to work on a paper, but the teacher didn't sign up for the lab.  This situation left me in limbo.  Time to improvise.

I've been thinking a lot about critical thinking.  As a teacher, the most important thing I can do is to teach students to be critical thinkers.  In the freefall of the classroom without a lab and therefore without a plan, I decided to have students write a definition of critical thinking.

I asked them, "What is critical thinking?"

I received some good responses, some good definitions.  I also received some bad ones.  "Critical thinking is thinking critically."  Ummm.  No.  "Critical thinking is thinking hard and coming up with a solution to a problem."  Better, but only marginally better.  I received some definitions that emulated definitions from the dictionary.  "Critical thinking is the process of using logic to determine the best course of action when confronted with a situation or problem."  Fancy.  But I still think it misses the point.

In my considerations of critical thinking, I've come up with a working definition that is simple.  For me, the critical thinker can gather not only facts from observations, but also meaning.  Or meanings.  Plural.  But more on that in a bit.

I told the students (seniors) to use critical thinking to give meaning to the results of a study about which I had heard.

The authors of this study took two groups of people, 30 American 6th grade students and 30 Japanese 6th grade students.  Each group was given a math problem to solve.  The math problem was impossible.  There was no solution, but the students weren't given that little bit of information.  Within ten minutes, the Americans had all given up.  The most common statement was "We haven't gone over this yet."  When the Japanese students were given the problem, they had to be stopped after an hour had gone by.  Not one had given up.

The majority of students came up with the following meanings for the results of the study:  Americans are lazy.  Japanese people are smarter.

They didn't think critically.


Their response was based on media messages, stereotypes, what they had heard from their parents, and a general low self-image generated by popular culture and the repeated disparagement of the American educational system.

A critical thinker would look beyond that.  A critical thinker would look at the study from several angles.  The first thing a critical thinker would do would be to break down the study.  The students were given an IMPOSSIBLE problem.  Therefore, the Japanese students were essentially wasting their time in trying to solve it.  That being the case, the Americans were smarter to quit.  Sometimes the only solution to a problem is to walk away from it.

A critical thinker would look even deeper into the study.  A critical thinker would start thinking about what the findings meant in terms of culture.  Eastern culture emphasizes the struggle.  It is glorious and noble to struggle.  The end result is only a secondary impetus to engaging in the struggle.  Whereas Americans?  It's all about the end-game.  Just win, baby.  But also about innovation.  If the traditional means of seeking a solution doesn't work, find a different solution.  Or re-frame the initial problem.  The problem wasn't the math problem.  The problem was they had been given a math problem.  They found a means of solving that problem.

A critical thinker would go beyond the study, beyond the results of the study, into the reactions of people who had heard about the results.  What is their first reaction?  Is there a secondary reaction?  What do the reactions say about the individual reacting, and does that individual typify the culture, and why?

It all comes down to asking that question.  Why?  This is the question the critical thinker asks that the non-critical thinker doesn't.  What is an easily answered question.  How is a little more difficult.  But Why never has an end.  There are causes with causes, and behind those causes are even more causes.  Why is too daunting for some people.  They are willing to accept the first answer that comes along and look no deeper.  But they never know if the first answer was the best answer.  They will say that it is.  They will believe that it is.  And if they never think critically, they can remain convinced that it is, until someone, often painfully, points out the error of their ways.

Knowing Me

Most people don't know each other.  Unless people spend most of their time in constant contact with one another, constantly filling each other in on all the events in their lives, how those events affected them emotionally, and their responses to those events, then they...



Oh, wait.  That's what Facebook is for.  And texting.

Well, okay, most people (aside from young adults and certain people that most of us will eventually unfriend due to the ongoing drama in their lives) simply don't maintain that kind of communication.  So we don't know one another.  And even those that do publish their lives on Facebook moment by moment are still giving a very subjective narrative about themselves.  If we even bother to read their posts, we can only hope we are reading between the lines correctly.

I have friends on Facebook  I haven't seen in twenty years.  They picture me as they knew me then.  Even those who have known me more recently may not know where I am now and what I am like.  I would like to think that I am constantly changing, constantly trying to be a better person than I was yesterday.  But just because I would like to think that is true, it may not be.  I may be worse.  But I can state with some confidence that I am not the person I was five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago...more.

Significant events in our lives change us.

A short list of events in my life which have profoundly changed me, and what I think about them:

At age 23, I quit drinking alcohol.

I had a problem.  I quit.  I have had people tell me they admire me for that, or respect that.  In all truth, it was a matter of necessity.  Drinking is bad for some people; drinking the way I did was very, very bad for me.  If I hadn't quit, I probably would have died.  I'm surprised I didn't.


I appreciate that people admire me for quitting, but the truth is, I took the easy way out.  I read an excellent quote on abstinence which sums up completely my feelings on that.  St. Augustine said, "Abstinence is easier than perfect moderation."  Abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, any addictive substance, is hard to implement, but easy to maintain.  Moderation, on the other hand, is easy to implement, but difficult to maintain.  Over the long haul, I took the easy way out.  I can maintain abstinence from alcohol.  I admire people who can maintain moderation.

At age 30, I was married.

Marriage required me to adjust the way I communicate.  I'm still prone to say what is on my mind, but marriage taught me to wait for the correct time, and to carefully consider my phrasing.  Many of you that knew me as a younger man probably recognized that at the time I was going to have my say no matter what anyone else thought.

  Now I am more careful, because I do care what at least one other person thinks.  When I am having a serious conversation, I am prone to very long pauses so I can say what I mean in a way that will mean something to the person to whom I am speaking.  My wife has told me that some people might not be sure if they like me because I don't talk much, and people tend to distrust that.  Can you imagine me being that way?

At age 33, I had my first child.


My time alone decreased yet again.  This was the first experience in my life where it was mandatory that someone else's needs came before my own.  In most relationships, the other person's needs can often wait, or they can attend to themselves to a certain degree.  It doesn't work that way with kids.  There is only right now.

At age 35, I was fired from my first job.

I had a very good job on a monetary scale.  I hated the job, and it wasn't good for me, but it allowed me to provide very well for my family.  Getting fired from that job was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me.  It caused me to experience financial distress due to the number of bills we had built up in our pursuit of the insanely acquisitive American dream, but it also allowed me to conceive of a world where I didn't dread going to work every day, a world in which I could be happier on a daily basis.  My subsequent jobs weren't much better, but I realized they were only jobs.

At age 40, I elected to go into teaching.


I made the decision, but I had my doubts.  Turns out I loved most aspects of teaching.  The students, the interaction, the inner growth that I experienced as a teacher.  I looked forward to most days at school.  I made a true discovery that most people, even the unruliest of students, can be talked to in a one on one situation and reasoned with.  I learned so much about language, and people, and myself.  I found a calling that would allow me to be happy.  Aristotle said, "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."  I found one that didn't, or at least one that didn't degrade my mind as quickly as my previous jobs.  But...

At age 43, I was fired again.

Why was I fired?  It wasn't lack of enthusiasm for the job.  It wasn't due to a lack of ability.  It certainly wasn't anything tawdry or scandalous.  The truth of the matter is, I don't know why.  The administration gave only hints.  I think the closest thing to the truth was that my philosophies and those of the administration were not compatible.  Funny how sometimes the vaguer things are, the closer to true they become.  But the effect of this termination on my personality is still yet to be determined.  I'm still not at ease in my mind with where I am on this.  One way it has definitely affected me is to make me more compassionate towards others who have experienced or are experiencing failure.  And it has made me more accepting of and grateful for my own failures.  We fail today so that we learn how to fail better tomorrow.  I think when we say someone is an unqualified success, we do them a disservice.  To be truly admirable, success must overcome failure.


Me at 45.

We are all the product of our pasts.  Here's a little of mine.  Of course, this is a subjective look at myself and my experiences.  Is there any other way?  There is no doubt that you know me better now if you have read this far.  Later today I may post on Facebook about my experience at Wal-mart, or something I cooked for dinner.  That won't tell you much about me. But the drama?  I'll leave that to the younger people, I think.

The Answer to the Question, How Long Will I Feel Like This?

Many of my friends on Facebook are former students.  Young people.  And I witness daily at least one case or another of a freshly broken heart.   But it isn't always the young people.  I see people my age who go through the same thing, just not as often.  That's probably a good thing, but still...

So many.

Broken hearts happen all the time.  To everybody.  But there is nothing quite so personal or so painful as having one.

I think I suffered from quite a few broken hearts.  Enough that I actually became pretty good at understanding what I was going through, why I was going through it, and what I had to do to make the pain stop.  So here's some advice for anyone dealing with a broken heart:

1)  Let yourself be sad.  You can try anger, you can try righteous indignation, or you can try denying sadness and pretend to be manically happy.  But the truth is, sad is the appropriate response.  You are losing something.  It's okay to be sad.  Sad is part of acceptance.

2)  Once you have gained acceptance, then it is time to realize that while it may not feel that way, you will get over your broken heart.  You have to.  You know that feeling where you wonder if it's even worth it to get out of bed, to go to work, to go to school?  It goes away.  It will.  It takes time, but it will go away.  And you do have some power to make it go away.  The most important phrase I learned concerning how to deal with a broken heart is this one:  "I'm going to have to start getting over this eventually.  Why not start now?"  And then I would get up and go to work or go to school or go for a bike ride or mow the yard.

3)  One of the easiest things you can do to help yourself get rid of a broken heart is:  nothing.  Even if you do absolutely nothing to get over your broken heart, it will heal.  At first, every waking moment will be consumed with the knowledge that you have a broken heart.  Then after a while, you will have to start reminding yourself occasionally that you have a broken heart.  Eventually, you may even go whole days without thinking about your broken heart. Of course, this is the slow method.  This method may take a long, long time.  I don't really recommend it.  There are two other quicker methods, and both work, but the side effects are completely different.

4) Quickest way to get over a broken heart:  Fall in love with someone else.  Yes, you can really do that.  It will be a brittle kind of love, most likely.  Rebound love.  This love will be driven by self-interest.  You don't want to let self-interest do the driving because self-interest has extremely short-term goals.  Self-interest will lead you to pick the wrong partner.  If the wrong partner discovers first that he/she is the wrong partner, he/she will leave you and you're back to square one on the heartbreak thing.  Or eventually that broken heart heals (as it would have done anyway) and you realize that you selected someone to be with for all the wrong reasons and you need to bail, probably breaking that person's heart in the process.  Side effects: broken heart #2 or spending a lot of time with someone you eventually realize you don't love.

5) Not so quick way, but quicker than doing nothing:  Devote your time to growing.  If the heart is a muscle (and I'm talking figurative heart, we all know the literal heart is a muscle), then when it is broken and healing, you need to devote yourself to working out the other strengths you have in order to compensate for the one that is healing.  Work on your friendships.  Spend time with people who you like to be with.  Work on your inner life.  Go places, do things, see things.  Do interesting things, even if you don't feel like it.   Go on a wild cave tour.  Ride in a hot air balloon.  Eat a sea urchin.  Read a book that you have always thought you should read but never have.  Strengthen relationships within your family.  Build something.  As you do this, your heart will heal.  And when it has healed, you will be a stronger, more interesting person overall.

I don't claim to know everything about how to get over a broken heart.  I only know what has worked for me.   To answer the question, "When will I stop feeling like this?" is not a simple answer, and the answer isn't really satisfactory.

You will stop feeling that way when you do.  And when you decide that you want to stop feeling that way badly enough to do something about it.

Where the Bananas Are

My latest addiction is Stumbleupon.com.  I can spend an hour easily jumping from one item to the next, constantly looking for items of interest.  When I signed up for an account, I was asked to list my interests, and one of those interests was quotations.  I love a well-constructed phrase that provides insight into the working of the human psyche or human society.

Of course, many quotations are meant to be inspirational.  I was perusing a website the other day that was filled with inspirational quotes when it occurred to me what I was doing, and why.

First it has to be understood that I am an unapologetic believer in evolution as a concept to describe how human society has been shaped. The development of the human language was a key factor in the success of humans as a species (7 billion strong and growing).

Before our current success, we had to survive.  Communication was key in our survival.  Of course, that isn't limited to just the human species.  It is key to many species, and the impetus for communication within a species deals with two main topics:  where food may be found and warnings of danger.

These concepts are only important to species who live communally.  We qualify for that.  Solitary animals usually only have two types of communications:  this is mine (stay away) and it's time to reproduce.  I guess we have those as well, but that type of communication is generally self-evident, I think, and doesn't lend itself to my current topic.

What does lend itself to my current topic is dancing bees.  Bees are a communal animal, and they have a means of letting other bees know where to get the pollen.  Upon returning to the hive, bees who have found a good source of pollen will do what is known as either "the waggle dance" or "the round dance."  The waggle dance tells the other bees the pollen is some distance away, the round dance is a shortened version of the waggle dance that tells the other bees that the pollen is closer.  If the pollen is really good, the bees dance harder.

Another animal behavior that lends itself to my topic is meerkat barking.  They live communally, too, and when they are out foraging, one meerkat will stand guard.  If the sentry spots something hinky, he barks, and everybody takes cover.  Then, once everyone is safe in the hole, the sentry will go out, barking constantly as he checks everything out.  When everything seems to be in order, he stops barking, and everybody comes back out.

Bees dancing to share food sources and meerkats barking to warn of danger.  I think the human language began with our primitive ancestors trying to convey similar concepts to one another.  We just got real good at it.  We developed a language capable of expressing both concepts in many ways, shapes and forms.  And as simple as these concepts seem, I want to take them down a step further.  I want to completely simplify the underlying idea.

There is food here:  At the most basic, this idea can be simplified to I can lead you to sustenance.

Danger approaches:  The root idea behind this is I see something you don't which will cause you harm.

In the first idea, sustenance can go beyond physical sustenance.  We, as humans, have progressed beyond just struggling day to day to find nourishment for our bodies.  We have reached a point in our development in which spiritual, emotional, and existential nourishment is much more difficult to come by than a bunch of bananas.

We have also moved past warning each other about approaching creatures which may be trying to eat us.  Our warnings usually have more to do with self-destructive behaviors, or warnings against misconceptions on where sustenance as understood in the first idea may be found.

Now think of every inspirational quote you have seen today, either on Facebook or wherever you get your inspirational quotes.  Does it offer sustenance or a warning?

I love quotes.  I love the simple expression of complex ideas inherent in the best quotes.  But I think the complexities of this world go far beyond what a simple quote can tell us.  We need to read, we need to try to  understand more than these simple quotes that we see all day can express.  We have moved beyond the simple bee dance and the meerkat bark.

We can't just throw quotes back and forth and hope to convey to one another the broad range of sustenance available and dangers present in today's society.  We have to read, we have to talk to one another, we have to truly communicate in order to really understand each other.  There is sustenance everywhere, and we can tell one another how to find it.  There is danger every where, and we can keep one another from falling prey to it.  But first we have to understand one another, and that has to come from a deeper level of communication than can be expressed in an internet meme posted on Facebook or Stumbleupon.  We have to remember that the inspirational quote can only tell us where the bananas are.  It is up to us to go get them.

Elegy for Robin Melton

This weekend, the world lost one of the truly great people I have known.

Robin Melton grew up in Billings, Missouri just like me.  She was in my brother's class, a year older than me.  She lived about a block from me.  She had a great yard for whiffle ball, and I remember playing there.  I remember her mother had one of those purple martin houses, and there was a particular bird living there which Robin pointed out.  She said he was very rare in this part of Missouri.  He looked to me like any other bird, but she knew he was special.

I wonder if Robin knew how special she was?  I think she did.  But she never held that over anyone.  She was intelligent, athletic, and beautiful.  Many people are at least one of those things.  She had the good fortune to possess all those attributes, and one more.  She was kind.

I was the kid brother tagging along when I went to her house.  Robin was impressive then, even before we all went through adolescence and realized the incredible beauty she possessed.  She played baseball on the boys' baseball team, and excelled at it. As a kid brother, I was used to being rejected by my brother's older cooler friends, but Robin welcomed me as an equal.

Growing up in a small town, there are rarely any of the cliques you will find in larger schools, but common interests do have a tendency to produce groups which spend more time together.  Robin was an athlete and a cheerleader.  She ran with a popular crowd, and she was usually at the center of that crowd.  She still made time for everyone that wanted to talk to her.

Years later, after I had gone through various life-shaping events, I ran into Robin.  She and my wife served on the board for the local Habitat for Humanity together.  My wife was as impressed by her as I have been for most of my  life.  We would see Robin at various events, or even just out shopping, and she always made time to say hello.

I even had the opportunity to interview for a job with Robin once.  I was between jobs at the time.  She knew I had a degree in English.  In the interview, she told me she had some wonderful scientists working for her, but they just couldn't write.  She tried to justify the additional expense of a writing consultant by exploring other areas where I might be able to pitch in.  Unfortunately, I had no back-hoe experience to go with my English degree, so the position didn't materialize.

She did ask me one question in the interview, though, that I have carried with me.  When I told her that I just hadn't found a job that I felt would make me happy and challenge me, she asked me why not.  She appeared to be honestly confused by the concept.

I think she spent her whole life challenging herself and succeeding, always moving forward.  Living any other way was not even a consideration.

In this part of Missouri, in any part of the world, Robin was one of the rare ones.  I have known a few people who have accomplished great things.  But I have never known anyone who did so with such grace, with such kindness, with such beauty.

What I've Been Reading (and feeling guilty about)

I've been reading THE CLASSICS, or at least trying to read the classics.  There are many books which I feel I should have read that I haven't yet.  I'm trying to make up for that.

Most of these books are available free on my Kindle.  Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazov are two examples.  I'm trying to read both.

But I have to admit, I've bogged down in Moby, and I fear the same may happen in The Brothers.  My life is lived in short bursts of activity.  Not often do I have the time to just sit and read and concentrate and spend a good amount of time thinking about what I have read.

All these wonderful time saving devices in my house, and I have less time than ever.  Or so I tell myself.  Even when I may have the opportunity, I feel guilty for indulging myself.  I always feel like there is something else I should be doing.

I should repaint the trim in my house.

There is a lot that could be done in the yard.

There are all kinds of projects I could be doing at the farm.

I need to go visit family more.

I should be spending more time with my kids.

I need to be working on my novel.

I should be doing more to find a job and help support my family.

Please don't think these reasons are in order of importance.  They just occur to me in random order, so I wrote them that way.

One day last week, I didn't feel well.  It started as a minor stomach thing, but was exacerbated by the fact that I didn't have any coffee in the house.  If I don't get my dose of caffeine in the morning, bad things happen.  That day, I somehow lost the drive to do anything else except read.  I read all of The Moon and Sixpence by Somerset Maugham.  If you haven't read him, you should.  Particularly The Razor's Edge.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself.  Between bouts of napping my way through a migraine and reading, the entire day got away from me.  Of course, guilt set in later, but I did enjoy myself.  I just needed the excuse of not feeling well to avoid the guilt long enough to read.

I need to read more.  Before life became so complicated, I read so much.  When I was a teenager, when I was in the Army, when I was in college, I read so much.  For anyone who thinks all their time is being absorbed by high school or college or the military, you have no idea.  Have a family.  Have a home.  Even without a job, I have no time.  I always stay busy.  There is something about the age I am, and my circumstances, that makes me feel guilty when I do things by myself which I enjoy.