The Last Day of Summer

Tom, the guy who lives next door, tells me that the rainy season starts October 15th. He’s old, and has lived in this area for longer than I’ve been alive, so I should believe him. All the same, I spent some time rummaging around the National Weather Service web site to see if he’s correct. He is, mostly: the rains do start in the middle of October, though there’s no one set day.

I also found that the warm days (by which I mean above 27 centigrade) generally end around the first of September. We’ve had a bit of an extension this year, but it looks like that’s going to come to an end. It’s 27 outside the office right now, but the highs for the next week are only expected to reach about 20 or 21. My kind of temperatures.

“Summer’s ending,” I told Kris when I first saw the forecast, with its stark change from sunny and warm on Tuesday to cool and damp on Wednesday.

“Shut up,” she told me. It’s been a long, dry summer (and our plants are suffering for it — I seem to have lost a blueberry!), but she’s not ready for it to end. To tell the truth, I don’t know if I am, either.

Don’t get me wrong — I love autumn. It’s my favorite season. But this has been a nice summer. I could wish for it to last a while longer. My cousin Bob just built us a wonderful new picnic table and delivered it on Sunday night. Couldn’t I be granted a few more warm days to enjoy it?

Too, there’s the fact that we’re beginning to believe that my Depression is seasonal. We had a couple of grey days a few weeks ago, and wouldn’t you know it? I fell into a deep funk. I’ve never given much credence to Seasonal Affective Disorder (also), but I’m going to pay close attention to my mood levels over the next couple of months. There may be something real here. (Tiffany was the first one to point out that my mood seemed to be influenced by the weather.)

I took a walk this afternoon, and enjoyed the sun. I had too. It may be the last I see of it for six months.

Coming Up Roses

I often grouse and complain in this forum. It seems fitting that today — on a day that I feel great — I should take some time to be happy and cheerful.

And I do feel great. Why?

I’ve lost eleven pounds in the past six weeks; my pants are no longer tight.
I’m writing more than I ever have in my life.
I’m making and saving money.
The weather has been gorgeous (if a little warm).
I love my wife and she loves me.
Our garden is alive with new growth: flowers, berries, veggies.
I have a cat sitting in the crook of my left arm as I type, purring.
My personal finance blog is off to an awesome start. (And my comics blog was doing fine til I stopped posting.)
I’m reading a great book: The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. (Again.)
I’ve been listening to great music (80s rock) all day.
I’ve been off the St. John’s wort for several weeks and feel fine.

And, most of all, I feel like I have a purpose. It has been years since I’ve had a purpose.

It seems everything’s coming up roses — everything’s going my way.

Update: I forgot to mention a couple of other things that have me happy:

Friends.
I made $425 at the garage sale last weekend, which I have earmarked for a Nintendo Wii this fall.
All of my weblogs have been very rewarding over the past month, and in many ways. (Keep sending me links, guys — I love it. I may even turn the flotch into a presentable stand-alone linkblog.)
Mike, a visitor to this site, took the time to look through my CSS file to find two bugs that had eluded me. Outstanding. The only reward he asked was: “Use Firefox. Don’t do drugs (or credit cards). Get out of debt and stay out of debt.” I already push Firefox heavily among PC-using friends and family, but I’m going to give a try on my Mac now.

If I think of more things that make me happy, I’ll post them.

Entrepreneurial

Dad was an entrepreneur.

He was always starting businesses, or trying to help others start them. When I was very small he operated Steve’s Lawnmowing Service. We still have the sign for this venture sitting out in the Custom Box Service warehouse. Nick loves it. So do I.

He also sold World’s Finest Chocolates. He would bring boxes of chocolate bars with him to church, and sell them after Sunday School. I can remember standing on the front lawn of the Mormon church in Canby, waiting for Dad to sell chocolate bars to all the parents. (I can also remember getting into a box of chocolate bars one day, and eating two of them before Dad found me, smothered in goo.)

He tried lots of other things, too: he was a flight instructor, he sold Shaklee (I think), he raised nursery stock.

But his first real success came with Harvest Mills. Dad started Harvest Mills in the mid-seventies. He built a wheat grinder from scratch. He like it so much — and so did his friends — that he decided to sell them. He developed a system for manufacturing them in a production line. Then, further capitalizing on the craze for health food, he developed the Little Harvey food dryers. These were an enormous success, and before long he had purchased one of the first plots of land in what was to become the Woodburn Industrial Park. Harvest Mills was a success.

Dad sold the business in the late-seventies for a large sum of money. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, he never saw full payment for the business. (My memory is: he sold the business for $300,000 payable in ten yearly installments, and that the buyer went bankrupt and somehow we only saw the first payment.)

The next six or seven years were tense. It was the early eighties, and the economic outlook was poor. Dad moved from one sales position to another: selling staples, selling industrial supplies, selling boxes. On his fortieth birthday — 31 July 1985 — he left his job as a box salesman and founded what would become his biggest success: Custom Box Service.

Died died ten days before the business turned ten-years-old, but his children (and nephew) have kept it running since. None of us are entrepreneurs, though. We don’t have that drive. Sometimes I sense a glimmer of it inside myself, but I recognize that in order to prosper as an entrepreneur, you need to be chasing a dream that you believe in one-hundred percent. Boxes are not my dream.

When I was a boy, Dad tried to get me to develop an entrepreneurial spirit, with mixed success. He encouraged me to sell seeds from a magazine. (I was too shy to knock on doors.) He tried to teach me to peel chittum bark that could be sold to god knows where for use as a natural laxative. (Carving bark from trees didn’t appeal to me.)

The only entrepreneurial bits that took hold were those that I developed myself. In fourth grade, in order to generate money for new comic books, I would take my old comic books to school and sell them to the other students. I would take my Star Wars trading cards and repackage them, selling each thick package for twenty-five cents each. I sold my Hardy Boys books in much the same way.

Now, for the first time in twenty years, I’m beginning to feel a bit of that entrepreneurial spirit. I have an idea, a plan, a vision. I know of a way to do what I love and to make money at it.

I will become an entrepreneur.

Irrational Compulsions

One
Every day on my drive to work, as I turn onto Oglesby Road for the final half-mile stretch, I unlock my car doors. Sometimes I actually think to myself, “I need to unlock the doors so that people can reach me if I’m in a crash.” Mostly though, I do this without conscious thought.

It’s very unlikely that I’ll ever crash on this half-mile stretch of straight, low-speed country road, the single piece of road that I am most familiar with (having spent my entire life traveling over it).
It’s even more unlikely that any crash on this stretch would incapacitate me, or require people to open the doors from the outside.
I don’t do this at any other time. Ever. Yet I do it every day.
I think the auto-locking car doors are stupid. They’re a nuisance and not a convenience. I have no idea when this became a standard feature or why. But have I ever searched how to de-activate the option? No.

Two
Every time I get milk from the fridge, I sniff the container before pouring. I don’t always check the date, but I always sniff the container.

Though I have had sour milk in the past — and have even had sour milk from an unexpired container — this has only happened a couple times in my entire life.
Lately I’ve begun buying the ultra-pasteurized milk, the stuff that lasts for six weeks or more. I usually finish a carton nearly a month before the expiration date. I still sniff the container every time.
I don’t sniff ice cream or any other dairy product. Only milk.
I sniff all milk containers I use, even those in other people’s homes.

Three
I sniff books, too, but not because I think they’re going to go bad.

The first thing I do when I get a book, or when I pick one up in a store, or at a friend’s house, is to sniff it.
I’ve always sniffed books (and magazines). I can’t remember a time that I didn’t.
I put my nose against the pages and fan them, getting a good whiff of the paper, the ink, the cover, the binding.
I have an unwritten, unordered classification for types of smells. If I wanted to, I could write down an entire taxonomy of book smells. There are general categories, of course — musty, smoky, newsprinty, new-y, etc. — but there are also minute gradations — like a late-seventies Harvey comic, like a Del Rey sci-fi paperback, like a grade school library book, like a European food magazine.
I’ll frequently smell a book and think something like “Aha! This book smells very similar to that book on dirigibles that I smelled at that thrift store we went to with Jenn in 2002.” Seriously.

Four
I am addicted to the internet.

My e-mail program polls for new messages every sixty seconds. Sometimes I check manually between automatic checks.
I check my friends’ weblogs many times each day.
When I post something on the comic book forums, or on AskMetafilter, or anywhere else, I check for responses over and over and over again, sometimes for days after the post.
I cannot allow myself to use an RSS reader because when I do, I subscribe to dozens of feeds. I check them each morning, and then I refresh constantly, craving the next hit, the next news story, the next new link. RSS readers kill me, make me permanently attached to my internet connection.
I write twice as many weblog entries as I actually post. I have scores of fragments saved to my hard drive. I want to post them all, but generally forget about an entry if I don’t finish it when it’s started.
I own seven domains. Each domain (but the latest) has a web site, though not all of the sites are fully functional or especially useful.

Odds and ends: I am pathologically incapable of following the “clean as you go” program; I “mess as you go” and then clean in bursts. I bathe every day, sometimes twice a day, somtimes three times a day, but I rarely shower. I loathe shaving, and would be wild and hairy if Kris would let me. I cannot help but make smart-ass remarks, even though I know it’s a learned behavior I picked up from my father, a behavior I disliked in him. I love to sort things, and always have: alphabetizing books, organizing the cooking spices, sorting a box of baseball cards, ordering a directory of mp3s. I seem compelled to not put fuel in vehicles until the last possible moment. At home, I drink very little water, but in restaurants I go through the stuff like it’s nothing, consuming a liter or more at each meal.

Small Meals

I started an exercise regimen at the end of January. That’s going well, but I’m actually gaining weight, not losing it. Why? Because I eat like a pig. As a result, I started a diet regimen last weekend.

The fact is: every time I’ve ever achieved sustained weight loss, it’s been as a result of meticulously counting calories. Am I going to eat those Sno-Balls? Fine. Then I’d better be entering them into FitDay so that I know what else I can’t eat later. Many people can lose weight without a detailed balance sheet. I cannot. It’s not that I don’t know how bad certain foods are for me, it’s just that I don’t alter my behavior unless the cold unfeeling numbers are staring me in the face: Sno-Balls == 360 calories.

One rough thing about counting calories is that so many modes of eating become problematic. Eating in restaurants? Whoa, that’s a monkey wrench. Fixing a nice meal at home? Counting calories is possible, but it can get complicated. The easiest way to eat when pursuing this sort of regimen is to just consume pre-packaged, pre-labeled food. I know this is bad on oh-so-many levels, both nutritional and moral, but sometimes certain values must be compromised for the more important goal. In this case, I’m going to be eating out of cans and boxes and the like for several months, until I can get myself steeled to a proper diet.

Fortunately, I’ve discovered one delicious, balanced meal: the corned beef sandwich. One slice of bread (not two), a hunk of cheese, and a couple slices of corned beef (along with some ketchup, mustard, and a slice of onion) produce a delicious and filling small meal that only packs 250 calories. Add a bowl of chicken noodle soup and you have a feast!

Small meals. Small meals. Kris has always scolded me for my inability to control portion sizes, and now I’m paying the price for it. Small meals. That’s what I’ll be consuming until the summer…

Good Night, and Good Luck.

We saw our fourth Best Picture nominee last weekend, the superb Good Night, and Good Luck. I knew little about the film when we entered the theater, and thus was pleasantly surprised to find it tautly written, well acted, and filmed lovingly in grainy black-and-white.

Good Night, and Good Luck. tells the story of reporter Edward R. Murrow‘s campaign against Senator Joseph McCarthy. The film wisely avoids providing detailed background to McCarthy’s crusade against communism; it assumes the viewer has a basic grasp of this piece of American history. Instead, the film focuses almost exclusively on the offices of CBS News and on the men (and few women) who risk their careers to confront McCarthy and his dogmatism. These men are not painted as heroes, but as ordinary fellows doing their jobs. The film uses actual archival footage of McCarthy, letting him damn himself.

This is an excellent film, my favorite non-documentary of the year. (Kris still prefers Crash and Brokeback Mountain.) Granted, there are a couple of opaque points — who is this Don Hollenbeck and why should we care about his story? — but on the whole, the film is tight and cohesive in a way that most modern Hollywood films, with their loose stories and superfluous subplots, are not.

Some other quick points:

I adored the sets.
A person could get lung cancer just from watching this film. There’s more smoking than I can recall ever having seen in any other movie. (Is this why there was a trailer for the upcoming Thank You For Smoking? If so, very funny.)
Alex Borstein plays a young woman named Natalie in this film. Kris and I both thought she looked like our little Aimee Rose.
Why is this film rated PG? I can’t remember anything that warranted this. Maybe it’s all the smoking.

More than anything, Good Night, and Good Luck. moved me. It was inspiring to watch the story of a small group of people standing up to a narrow-minded man abusing his power. There are some clear parallels between McCarthyism and the machinations of the current administration. This film made me realize that I need to do more than just complain in this weblog; I need to do something.

Kris was in a foul mood all weekend.

That’s not true: she started the weekend in a stellar mood. We had dinner with Marcela and Pierre (and their beautiful children), which left us craving more of their company. Kris, in particular, finds their conversation stimulating. While Louis and Ella showed me how to play their favorite games (Peanut Butter & Jelly being the #1 choice), the other three adults sat at the dinner table, discussing politics with wine and candlelight. Kris loves this sort of thing: adult conversation about adult topics.

Recently, Kris has been watching a The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. “I love this show,” she tells me. “Everyone is so smart: the commentators and the guests. It’s great to see intelligent people discuss the issues.” (She’s also become a fan of of the Cursor linked news summaries, which you ought to visit if you haven’t already.) I don’t watch the show with her, but she often gives me condensed versions of each night’s stories.

Last weekend the news had overwhelmed her. “I have this seething anger that no one seems to be PAYING ATTENTION,” she told me.

“You know,” I said during one of her sour patches, “you really ought to give Dave a chance. He’s educated, intelligent, and keenly interested in world affairs. Of all our friends, he’s probably most able to carry on the sort of conversation that you crave. When we were at lunch Friday, we had a fine discussion about the decline of oratory in this country. He told me about the book he was reading, a biography of Lincoln. He’s well-informed.”

Kris sighed.

She wishes I were more keenly interested in world affairs. Like Pam, I bury my head in the sand. I purposely avoid exposure to the news because:

I can’t influence it;
it’s always the same thing over-and-over;
it only makes me depressed.

The truth is I do have strong opinions about most social and political issues. My views aren’t always popular, however, and I find it pointless — even destructive — to argue about politics, so mostly I am quiet. (This is especially true in-person. I am not a good debater. Unfortunately, many of the people who want to debate — Kris, Dave, Dana — are formally trained in the art so that it’s frustrating to argue with them. Even when they’re wrong, they win the argument.) It’s not worth it to me to speak my mind about, say, abortion, if the price of speaking my mind is a strained (or lost) friendship. I speak my voice in the polling booth, and in the money I contribute to various causes. (Although it is true that most of my causes are non-partisan entities like the Oregon Historical Society and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.)

I guess what I’m trying to say, though poorly, is that I’ve been thinking recently about my relationship with the world, especially regarding politics and social activism. I’ve tried to suppress these sorts of thoughts, most of all in this weblog, aside from the usual angry tirade about our President. Maybe it’s time for me to change. Maybe it’s time for me to become more informed. Maybe it’s time for me to care.

Maybe it’s time for me to voice my opinion, the consequences be damned.

In Praise of St. John’s Wort

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t care if the benefits from St. John’s Wort are the result of a placebo effect, and I don’t care whether there’s genuine physiological response to the stuff. It works for me, and that’s all that matters.

St. John’s is purportedly a mild all-natural anti-depressant. Its proponents are fond of declaring that it is the most widely used anti-depressant in Germany. From early-May to mid-August I took 300mg of St. John’s Wort three times a day. From early-May to mid-August I felt pretty good, was able to shake the depression that had begun to latch onto me.

Then, for whatever reason, I stopped taking the stuff. Gradually — so gradually as to be imperceptible to me — I sunk back into depression until by the end of November I was mired sorrow and self-pity. I was paralyzed by self-analysis. Just before Christmas I began taking the St. John’s Wort again. “What the hell?” I thought. “It can’t hurt.”

Boy, howdy!

I noticed positive effects within days. (The true benefits of St. John’s Wort take a few weeks to manifest themselves; it takes time for the stuff to accumulate in your system.) The past couple days have been especially fine. I’ve felt at ease in group situations, I’ve felt good about myself and about the world in general. I’m eager to refocus on things like my diet, my finances, and my writing.

So, please: if you know (or suspect) that St. John’s Wort is bunk, please don’t tell me about it. Let me enjoy the placebo effect.

(Also: apparently it was the St. John’s Wort and not the melatonin that had gave me such fantastic lucid dreams last spring and summer. The dreams faded when I stopped with the St. John’s Wort, and now they’ve returned in the past couple weeks. Crazy dreams, wild stuff. Exhausting. I love it.)

As I mentioned above, I’m ready to write again. Story ideas have begun to occur to me while I’m driving, so that I have to pull over and jot them down on the backs of business cards. I’m researching the writing classes offered by the various colleges in the Portland area. I’m reading about writing. And, perhaps most importantly, I’ve joined Andrew, Josh, and Paul H. to establish the Eastmoreland Writers’ Guild (or Woodstock Writers’ Guild, if you prefer). Our hope is that monthly meetings will goad us into productivity.

Words My Father Taught Me

“Think it’ll rain?”

That’s what my father always said on days like today, days on which the rain fell long and hard, days on which the fields and ditches flooded, spilling into the road so that small streams formed on hills, days on which even an Oregonian craved an umbrella.

“Think it’ll rain?” was one of Dad’s mantras. It’s from him that I gained much of my sense of humor (which isn’t necessarily a good thing): the dumb observations and, especially, the use of repetition. (I often think to myself that repetition is the cornerstone to humor. Kris disagrees. You can imagine how she suffers.)

This cartoon has always reminded Kris of our relationship.

Another of Dad’s chestnuts was “should we make like a tree and leaf?” whenever it was time to go home. I’ve heard countless variations of this from other people, but that was Dad’s particular favorite.

Some of the things he said all the time weren’t particularly nice. When a family member did something dumb, he’d say, “If you had a brain, you’d take it out and play with it.” Sometimes to Mom he’d say, “Dumb woman — that’s like saying woman twice.”

I’d repeat this stuff to my friends, and sometimes to my friends’ parents. I can remember one instance during high school in which I used the “dumb woman” bit when a friend’s mother did something silly. (And this was a smart woman, a woman I respected.) It didn’t even occur to me that I was being misogynist. This stuff was bred into me, just as was a low-level racism and a low-level hatred of gays. (I’m happy to report that I seem to have shed most of the vestiges of these prejudiced ways.)

Dad was a good guy, and funny, and I have a great fondness for those little phrases he used to say all the time, but he was also something of a jerk.

Voluntary Addiction

I’ve begun playing World of Warcraft again.

My return to the game has led me to wonder: do most people struggle with low-level addictions, or is there actually a type of addictive personality? I don’t just mean addictions to drugs or tobacco or alcohol, but addictions to little things: coffee, chocolate, ice cream, and computer games. How common are these small compulsions? Or are there simply People Like Me who are more susceptible to addictions than normal folk?

My life has been filled with addictions since boyhood. What are collections if not manifestations of addiction? My web-surfing? That’s a sort of a addiction. My collection of comics? That’s also an addiction. My library of books? That’s a rather large addiction!

Does it take a special personality to succumb to addiction, or does everyone suffer from these compulsions, if only to a small extent? I’m curious.

You may recall that I became addicted to World of Warcraft earlier this year, spending fully ten percent of my life playing it between last November 23rd and April 15th. At the height of my addiction, I spent twenty percent of my life in game: four or five hours every day.

As may be expected, I’m wary about playing again. Addiction may rear its ugly head once more. The World of Warcraft experience is so fun, so immersive, that even six months after having quit the game cold turkey, I found myself dreaming of its virtual environments. I longed to roam the savannah and the jungle and the mountains defeating gnolls and the like. So I’m giving it a chance.

I have been back in-game for ten days now, and have been pleased with my restraint. I have placed limits on myself. I have a kitchen timer by my side, and it serves as a constant reminder not to become swept up in the game. I stop playing after designated periods of time. I spend days between each play session. I don’t do “just one more thing” before logging off for the night.

I am exercising moderation.

My goal is to limit play to between seven and ten hours a week. This may seem like a lot, but an ancillary goal is to take time from other wasteful activities rather than from those things that are important. So long as I trade web-surfing time or comic-book-reading time for World of Warcraft-time, things are fine.

It’s been great fun to start a new character on a role-playing server, adventuring with both Joel and Scott, as their time allows. I do not regret this decision.

Yet.

Now that I’ve managed to stabilize my weblog, I’m gradually bringing others back on-line. My brother Jeff returned last week, and the Mirons made a new post over the weekend. Welcome back!

(And stay tuned for the debut of Amy Jo’s weblog…)

In Praise of Autumn

We have passed some critical stage of fall-ness. When I look out my office window to the maple in the front yard, I can see it shed great clumps of leaves with every gust of wind. As I watch the leaves and listen to Pachelbel’s Canon, I am reminded of those first few heady weeks of college. Autumn always reminds of college and of freedom.

(Because I have a need to have a favorite everything, I’ve recently decided that autumn is my favorite season. Spring and autumn are the only choices, really, because summer and winter are too extreme. I like autumn best because it is warm-going-on-cool, rather than the reverse. I also like that everything is already green, but fading. Early autumn features produce from the garden, mid-autumn dazzles with its riotous colors, and late autumn is all about family and friends. Autumn is wonderful.)

When I walked into the kitchen this morning, I was overwhelmed by memories of school cafeterias: the smells of mass-produced corn and mashed potatoes and spinach, the sounds of dishware clattering at the dishwasher, the sights of people eating and laughing.

This reminds me of all my little friends, of Harrison and Antonio and Ian and Kaden, and of the discoveries they’re making every day at school. I think of first grade and of the novelty of so many kids in one place. I think of the school library, of the classroom, of the gym.

I think of the playground, and of the games we used to play there. I think of tetherball and four square and wallball and kickball and “hot lava” and of simply running from one end of the grass field to the other.

It’s a good day for reminiscing. It is a narrow distraction.