Don’t Mention It.

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Breaking from the normal thought processes, I’m going to offer some blogging advice: Don’t Mention It. That’s the gist of it. Keep your mouth shut. My blogging advice is to keep your mouth shut. No not really. Not entirely. I’ll explain.

For explanation, I’ll offer up the examples I’ve seen, the first of which is when the blogger tells you, “Sorry my post is so crappy today,” and then they begin to tell you all the excuses why, as if you wanted to know, “I had lots of laundry today.”

Not good practice. It would have been better if Captain Blog didn’t mention it. Laundry isn’t the most interesting thing in the universe. Reading about laundry is even less interesting.

Here’s another one, usually following a holiday or a weekend, a blogger will tell everyone, “I wasn’t able to get much done in my blog because I was so busy with other things. I had to schedule a colonoscopy, my dog died, my apartment was a wreck and my mother was coming to visit.”

Obviously, the most interesting part of all that is how and why this person groups a colonoscopy in the same category as their mother coming to visit. Sigmund Freud just dug himself up out of his grave.

Remember my advice: Don’t Mention It.

Personal problems don’t necessarily make interesting articles. Sure, a reader can choose to read about your personal problems, or not. Like changing the channel on the television, the audience can move on to something else. I suppose you could even detail the colonoscopy you scheduled, if you felt the urge, but I can’t imagine there being a huge audience for such stuff.

Another one that maybe only bothers me and no one else in the whole world, is when someone makes an entirely new blog post about how the previous post was full of errors. “I didn’t mean to have so many mispelled words, please forgive me, cause i’m not used to so much resposibitley of making blog every day.”

Okay, we get it, you’re new. But if your every entry is about how bad you are at the blogging, it might be better for the entire infonet if you just quit. Wouldn’t it be great if we all recognized our limits? Even Eddie Van Halen realized his band was nothing without a singer. That’s why he had two, count ’em, two, different singers. But now, that’s almost off topic…

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Don’t mention it.

Instead of telling people how bad you are at grammar, punctuation, and spelling, maybe take a new track and start detailing how you learned there are two esses in the word misspelled, how you learned where the colon goes, how you learned to make it work, how you managed to make time for the latest article, or how you managed to have your mother visit AND get the blog done. Wouldn’t that be something? A post like that would help others learn how to juggle a busy schedule, or even how to spell.

Wouldn’t it be better if the apologetic blogger just fixed the errors rather than spending so much time apologizing? Grammar, punctuation, spelling—these are the three major ingredients to readable sentences. It only takes the reader half a minute to read the article, so it shouldn’t take the writer much longer to re-read, proofread, and edit.

Finally, I’ll take my own advice and tell you I’ve learned recently the word harassment only has one are and two esses. Embarrassment, on the other hand, has two ares and two esses. Cool, eh?

(Next time, I’ll write about whether it’s better to spell out a letter name phonetically, like ares and esses, or to capitalize them, like Ss and Rs.)

The Convincing

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For so many of us traveling through life, the meaning of individual life gets blurred with the purpose. Getting caught up in the usual struggles associated with survival can blind us to our goals. Losing sight of the basic principles of existence is like entering a room and forgetting why you went in there. Stare at the walls of the room all you want, they don’t offer any answers. Or do they?

We all do a lot of convincing. Sometimes we convince others, but mostly we convince ourselves. How many, on this journey through life, spend a lot of energy convincing a brain of its own correctness? We have an inner desire to be right. We all seem to have a drive to get on the right side of any issue. We want to get there quickly and stay there. We feel like there’s safety in the formed opinion. The longer you’re on the wrong side of the road, the more likely you are to get wrecked. Right?

Or maybe we only think it’s like that.

I wonder what would happen if, instead of arriving early and setting up residence, we decided to be undecided. What if we didn’t try to convince ourselves we are right about everything and instead decided to discover? What if, instead of forming an opinion and standing firmly on that opinion, we created a fluid sense of our opinions? How would life change if our need to form bias was controlled by our will rather than by whoever shouts the same bias loudest or with the most flowery language? Would we learn more? Would we learn less? Is it possible to loosen a set of opinions gathered over a lifetime? Is it possible we’re limiting ourselves with our set way of thinking?

What’s amazing is we do it every moment of every day. At this moment, any one of us is adding bricks to a wall of opinions. It’s a metaphorical wall inside our minds. We all have one. The question here is: What kind of wall are you building? You need to know if your wall is defense against the outside world or self-made prison. Is it keeping you from getting hurt? Is it keeping you from getting out? Is it a wall of mossy green? A wall of flame? A wall of bones? Or is it a short wall so you can still manage to have conversations with the neighbors?

However we decide to do life, we must survive. If changing your opinion puts you in danger, then don’t listen to me. Keep doing what you’re doing to survive.

Metaphorical walls can have metaphorical gates, windows, and even fluid sections, bricks made of smoke, bricks made of glass, bricks made of magma. We each do what is important for our individual life. We get to decide if our walls are formed from a solid-bedrock-convincing or from a wet-sand-convincing like a sand castle we get to form again and again in ever-changing styles, a never-ending masterpiece of discovery.

On The Wall

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Battles lost and battles won;

We’ll be bones before we’re done.

Two men shouted, “Get yourself a gun!”

Then turned and shot each other for fun.

 

No one said, “Life is easy.”

Except for me,

Right now.

 

No one said, “Let’s be sleazy.”

Well, maybe someone,

Who reads out loud.

 

Whenever you think you got it all

Figured out. “I’m on the ball!”

Your masterpiece seems a childish scrawl,

When you see what’s painted on the wall.

No-Home-November

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A man with a No-Shave-November face came up to me yesterday and demanded that I give him cash. I immediately asked him what I owed him and he stopped in his tracks. He wasn’t expecting such a response.

I told him I’d cut him a check on Thursday and we both laughed. Nobody uses checks anymore—not even the homeless. The homeless do have pets though.

An increasing number of those without homes these days will have some sort of animal companion. This particular gentleman had a small dog in the cart he was pushing around. Dogs are quite popular, especially small ones. Cats, less so. Cats don’t like being put on a leash, so they aren’t nearly as popular with the nomadic culture.

Since this hairy guy was feeding two, I figured I’d give him a couple bucks. It wouldn’t go very far, but then, it wasn’t going to do much for me either. I would certainly skip a snack, or seven snacks, to know the man and his dog might eat. Here’s to hope and the hereafter. May we all have homes in the hereafter.

Not too long ago, in the same part of town, I saw a woman with a snake. Life is full of patterns and this is a recurring one in my life. Why do women like to have snakes as pets? Not all women do, for sure. But whenever I learn of someone who has a pet snake, it’s never a man. Ive never known a man to have a pet snake, but I’ve known at least ten women who’ve opted for the slithery variety of pet, though I’ve only recently started wondering why.

“And what do you feed your pet snake?”

“It eats mice.”

“What kind of mice?”

“Live ones.”

“So you’re a woman who doesn’t mind handling mice? Or snakes? A woman who doesn’t cringe at the fact that a mouse is not dead when it gets devoured? No? Hmmm…interesting.”

Talk about destroying the stereotypes of women in my mind. I had the apparently goofy misconception of women being afraid of critters—especially the critters that slither, or the kind of critters with whiskers and tiny feet.

Yet another stereotype I had in my mind was that homeless people don’t care about much. Not true at all.

The woman cared about her snake. The man with the big beard on his face and the mini-dog in the grocery cart cared about his dog. There was a dog food bag in the cart with the dog. I couldn’t see the dog food, but I didn’t happen to see any people food anywhere, or even human food bags. So the dog was probably not neglected. I’d extend the benefit of the doubt for him.

I guess once you learn something like this, you change your mind, and that’s exactly what I did. I stopped thinking of homeless people as careless. They have all the same cares, and can be as caring as anyone who just happens to have a house to sleep in.

Makes it easier to care about them, doesn’t it? Once you realize they’re all, in some way, exactly like the rest of us.

Noise

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Noise is everywhere. It’s in your left ear. It’s in your right ear. At work, in your house, at the zoo, on the street, at the movie theater, at the store, in the deli, at the fish market, in your shoes, on the train, at grandma’s house, at the library, even in your mind—noise is everywhere.

One of the troubling items on noise’s long list of negative characteristics is its loose definition. To define noise, you can’t take a poll. No two people define noise the same way. A baby crying? Noise to one. Delicate, lovely, superior sound to another. The sound of rushing water? Pleasant, soothing, whispering waves to one. The fright of approaching death to someone else.

Noise is so annoying. We can’t even define how noise annoys!

Another item on that list of annoying characteristics is the fact that it is so hard to find the source. Have you ever heard a low rumble from somewhere inside the earth and wondered where that noise was coming from? Have you ever heard the ticking of machinery and weren’t sure there was machinery near you? Have you ever heard the ocean and been miles from it? There are many noises we hear but can’t locate the source.

To locate the source would be to define the noise, wouldn’t it?

For this we should conduct an experiment. Like any experiment we need control. In any experiment we need to reduce the amount of material we measure so we can get more specific data. Because noise is so pervasive, we’ll have to limit the amount of noise we actually hear during the experiment. What’s the best way to limit noise? Earplugs.

Alright, get your earplugs ready. Whatever kind you like best. The fitted rubbery kind are nice, especially if you have different sizes of ear holes than most people you know. The foam kind can work really well too: squeeze them and they form to fit your ear holes as they expand. Or maybe you don’t want earplugs at all. If you prefer the noise-cancelling headphones, that’s fine. Get those on.

Once we’re all ear-plugged and ear-muffled up, let’s start listening.

Hear anything? Not much, right?

This is the first step in discovering where the noise comes from. By cancelling the majority of the noise around us all, we can focus on the leading cause of noise. What do you hear?

What? You can hear your own breathing, your own heartbeat, your own belly gurgling? So that’s it! There’s the ultimate source of all the world’s noise, right there. It’s you!