Real Joe

Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike it merely to show you have one. If you are asked what o’clock it is, tell it, but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman. - Lord Chesterfield

I sat in a meeting yesterday at the company I’m consulting for and really struggled to keep my “learning” in my pocket. Misconceptions were flying about that I really wanted to challenge so as to help solve a problem.

But after reading this quote this morning, I realize there was a part of me that also wanted to display my knowledge. The tip off, now that I think about it, was that I started getting nervous as I mentally prepared to speak.

The problem was more complicated than a lack of knowledge in the room, of course. Lots of fears and resentments and who knows what other relationship garbage. I thought I caught myself in time, but now I’m not entirely sure.

I’ve been asked to link Real Joe to a men-oriented web site and while perusing it, I stumbled on an article written by a woman about her approach to ogling men.

It occurred to me this morning that in the two days since I read it, I’ve been seduced by her message and have somewhat subconsciously been adjusting my mannerisms.

“Shoulders are the foundation for the character of a man. Slumped shoulders, like those of an adolescent being reprimanded by the school principal, tell me the guy probably has no clue how to tie his own shoes, which means I get to play his mom — no thanks.”

MY BRAIN: Dang, I have a bit of bowed back so I better work on this. : Ok, man, stand up straighter. Keep an eye out for babes.

“…eyes are what hold the power and my attention… I want enough information to invite my curiosity but still leave much to the imagination… I am especially drawn towards a man who trusts his eyes enough to gaze upon me…Sometimes, when I’m feeling very brazen or wearing something I know is naughty, I’ll look right at a guy. If he averts his gaze, then I forget him. If he returns my glance with a long one of his own, I’m putty.”

MY BRAIN: Putty? Sheeeeit, I gotta get better at my ability to return a glance. : Ok, try to make eye contact and hold it longer than usual.

It’s amazing to me how this stuff can ease its way into my head and then affect my behavior without my even noticing it.

I subscribed to Men’s Health and Men’s Journal magazines recently and they’re full of stuff that can influence me in this way. My sons get these mags, too, along with the more blatantly sexist ones like Maxim, FHM and Playboy. I wonder how much they’ve inherited their father’s vulnerabilities and insecurities and if this stuff eases its way into their heads, too.

The desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world. - John Le Carre

I don’t like commuting two hours a day for this consulting gig I’m on. I miss having copious amounts of time to write and work on Real Joe stuff.

But when I saw this quote, it occurred to me that I could easily get insulated from the normal stuff of day-to-day work life that most everyone else experiences. The introvert in me kind of likes the solitary life of a writer sometimes.

I think I’ve been unconsciously complaining to myself about this, now that I think about it. Better to frame it as a great opportunity to ‘watch the world.’

Shit. Time to go to work already. Ooops, there I go again.

I’ve been working on Real Joe for a couple of years, but only the last twelve months in earnest. Here’s an article about a guy who’s been working to solve a huge problem for thirty years and just now is seeing it come to fruition. It helps put what I’m doing in perspective. In Africa, irrigating with saltwater

Here’s an eye-catching headline: ‘Puffy’ Combs says trial changed him
It’s easy to be cynical when I read that Puffy said after being aquitted, “I’ve changed, I’ve matured. This whole thing has made me deeper. It’s not what it was about before … I want to sit down and think about it and try and understand it on an intellectual level. I’m going to be taking some time off to make sure I evaluate everything and get my priorities straight. I have to see what’s important: my family, my children, my faith in God.”

Combs evidently credited God for his victory, along with the jury and his lawyers. I suspect that God declined to get involved once He found out Johnnie Cochran was on duty. (There. Cynicism out of my system.)

God has surely been knocking at Puffy’s door all along, however, and it sounds like Puffy just might be ready to listen. If you look at Puffy’s words, though, they could easily be any of ours after any one of our potentially life-changing events that invited us to open our eyes to our mistaken thinking and goofball behavior.

Have any of us had an affair, or come close? Lost our temper and hurt someone? Performed poorly or unethically on a job? Neglected our families or friends to the point of harming the relationships? Done something illegal for which we could have gotten into big trouble?

So I’m rooting for Puffy. He could become a much better dad now. He could become a role model. Hey, I wonder if Nelson Mandella could find something useful for him to do?

Three St. Olaf students killed on Illinois highway
Another wrong-way drunk driver on the freeway. This tragedy triggered more than a few chills since my son was in a similar accident five years ago. He IM’d me yesterday, saying he felt pretty lucky to be alive after reading what happened. He had a seatbelt on but so did the St. Olaf students. I’m just grateful that he’s not bitter, despite his multiple spine surgeries and ongoing pain.

I winced, though, when I read that St. Olaf’s dean of students said, “These are great kids and they were great friends. You don’t expect to lose people this good.”

Huh? Normally, one expects jerks to die?

I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work. – Ben Franklin

I got word on Friday that the media outfit that I’ve been pitching my Real Joe radio show proposal to for the past four months has decided to pass. Shit shit shit.

I’d gotten an email the day before. I started getting very nervous just seeing the email sitting in my inbox. Not knowing what it said, I hesitated to open it up. Instead, I backed away from the computer and sat down to just write in my journal to try to put it in perspective. I reminded myself that there’s no way to know if the decision is ultimately good news or bad news, that I’m entitled to the joy of working on what I’m doing but not the results, that I have so much to be grateful for already. This helped, but I was still excited and nervous.

I wrote, “Ok, now I’m going to go read the email. Breathe easy. Let go.” And then I opened up the email and it read, “I must have your number wrong because I just tried to call you. Call me on Thursday, ok?”

Pfffffffttttt. I laughed at the big build up, only to have no news at all. Pretty much the same routine repeated itself on Friday, only via voicemail. I wrote in my journal, “If it’s rejection, I’ll not be deterred. It’s my vocation. I have to obey.”

It was a short phone conversation. The caller liked the stuff I submitted but a higher-up decided to pass on it. No reasons were given, and after I hung up, it occurred to me that I had a right to ask for detailed feedback so I cranked out an email asking for it.

So this weekend I took a little break from writing Joe to Gos, my first since I started them back in November. I kept thinking, “Well, c’mon, show your persistence in the face of rejection, get back to writing, work on the web site, etc.”

But without really deciding, I ended up wallowing in the other good things in my life the whole weekend: family dinner followed by board games with my daughter on Friday night. Coffee with my friend Jim on Saturday morning. A long nap on Saturday afternoon, followed by a movie, dinner, and a romantic Saturday night with my sweetie. A leisurely Sunday morning of reading the paper. Great progress on doing the taxes on Sunday afternoon. A late afternoon racquetball match in which I played better than I have in a month. Another delightful family dinner tonight.

And tonight I feel energized. There are 10,000 different ways for this to work, and I’ve just found one that, for now, doesn’t.

My mom has sold her house and is moving out in a couple of weeks. It’s odd to write ‘her’ house since it’s always been either ‘our’ or ‘their.’ My dad started building it the year I was born, 1949, and I lived there till I was 16 and then summers till I was 21.

I had coffee with her yesterday and I walked around before I left, fully cognizant that this might be the last time I’d ever be in it. The memories came flooding back and after I left, I drove around the neighborhood a bit to experience more of the same. And I’ve decided I’ve got to go back one more time, maybe with a tape recorder, maybe with a camera, and maybe better yet, with my brother. He and I walking around together would really trigger the memories. I wonder what I’ll learn?

She didn’t have dad’s urn at the house. My brother has it. I think I’ll stop today and pick it up.

In two weeks there’s a memorial mass for him at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Mendota. I spent a good chunk of my life at that church and adjoining school, so that’ll be another memory flood. Maybe I’ll take the whole day off to immerse myself.

Too many books that claim a spiritual focus really speak from a plane where we can’t live our daily lives. It’s important to be uplifted, but it’s equally important to know that the most ordinary and confused moments of our lives are infused with a spirituality if we know how to look. - Kent Nerburn

This is from Nerburn’s web site where he’s posted some replies to readers about his new book, Road Angels : A Pilgrimage Down America’s Coast of Dreams, to be published in June.

It’s what I’m trying to do each day… get better at knowing how to look for the spirituality in the “ordinary and confused moments” of my everyday life. And be consistent at doing the looking. Simple. But hard.

An ordinary life examined closely reveals itself to be exquisite and complicated and exceptional, somehow managing to be both heroic and plain. – Susan Orlean

I really like this statement. It’s from the introduction to Orlean’s new book, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My encounters with extraordinary people.

What appeals to me about it is that it encompasses part of what I’m trying to do with Real Joe. We’re all ordinary Joes, but when we get increasingly better at examining the daily stuff of our lives, then we get better at seeing how “exquisite and complicated and exceptional” each of us is. And that message just doesn’t seem to come across very loudly in the culture we all swim in.

You’ll break the worry habit the day you decide you can meet and master the worst that can happen to you. - Arnold Glasow

I don’t think the phrase “meet and master” works for me. I’d maybe substitute “learn from” or “adapt to.” But the point is a good one.

When I think of the uncertainty surrounding my wife’s brain tumor and accompanying symptoms, do I worry about it? I do worry, but lately I seem to frame it with “I wonder what’ll happen next?” and then follow that with “I wonder how I’ll handle it?” followed by a vague “Help me handle whatever happens” type prayer.

Our local paper carried a story today about a young Northfield man who was killed last weekend crossing the street while at college. My sons knew him pretty well. I sometimes wonder why I don’t worry too much about my kids getting killed, since one narrowly escaped getting killed in a car accident five years ago. Maybe it’s because my wife’s always done the lion’s share of worrying about the kids. Or maybe it’s because that’s just the way we are.

Maybe I’m deluding myself, but I don’t seem to have a worry habit right now. It’s something to be grateful for, I guess.

There ain’t much fun in medicine, but there’s a heck of a lot of medicine in fun. – Josh Billings

I rented the movie City Slickers last night and watched it with my wife Robbie (her suggestion) and daughter while we ate great take-out Indian food. My wife and I had seen it years ago, but remembered liking it a lot and thought it would be appropriate for our daughter, age 15, to see with us.

I’d forgotten that the Billy Crystal quote I used in a Joe to Go a week or so ago, “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place” was from this movie. This time, though, it was a follow-up line that made me laugh so hard, tears rolled down my legs. Crystal denies to one of his pals that an attractive woman was flirting with him, insisting that she was just being polite. “Polite?” his pal says incredulously. “That was ‘I love your ass, can I wear it for a hat?‘” I started my patented howling laugh, and this in turn triggered peals of laughter from Robbie and my daughter, laughing mainly at me. We paused the VCR to give us time to recover.

Later, the same buddy notices this woman bouncing up and down on the saddle of her horse and challenges Crystal to admit to the fact that he’d “love to screw her brains out.” Crystal wryly comments “Oh, that’s a lovely metaphor, right up there with that other favorite of yours, ‘Bang the shit out of her.’” Again, the three of us, with me leading the way, laughed till it hurt.

The final sidesplitter. As the city boys bring the cattle herd back to the ranch, the owner can’t believe they did it all on their own and comments, “I’m as happy as a puppy with two peters.” My daughter looked at me and laughed a little, and then I said, “Hey, when your teacher asks you tomorrow ‘Hi, how are you?’ you can use that line.” The thought of it struck her funny bone and this time she laughed so hard that Robbie and I laughed at HER till it hurt.

Several times today I thought of these scenes from the movie and laughed out loud. And I was grateful to have had the experience with my daughter. We’ve been cautioning her about not being too much of a goody two-shoes at school and this kind of mild crudity seemed an appropriate medicine for the ailment. One of my best memories with my dad was doing the same kind of infectious laughing watching Laurel and Hardy on TV. I hope it’s a memory maker for her, too.