The Three Little Purple Arks Where the Wild Things Are

(With thanks and all due credit to Maurice Sendak, Crockett Johnson, and the original authors of The Three Little Pigs and the Noah's Ark story...)

The night Noah wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another
his Mother called him “WILD THING!”
and Noah said “I’LL EAT YOU UP!”

So he was sent to bed without eating anything.

Now his Mother saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time, and that poor Noah was being influenced by this wickedness.

So his Mother said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race —and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground and under the sea—for I regret that they have made you misbehave."

"Make yourself three arks", she told Noah, "one of wood; one of sticks; and one of bricks".

"Take with you pairs of every kind of beast of the land, a male and its mate, and put them on the ark of wood. And also pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth, and put them on the ark of sticks. And also pairs of every kind of creature of the sea, male and female, and put them on the ark of bricks."

After thinking it over for some time, Noah decided to listen to his Mother, but he had no wood nor sticks, nor bricks, so he took his big purple crayon and made three arks as he was instructed.

And he put the beasts of the land on the ark of wood, and the birds on the ark of sticks, and the creatures of the sea on the ark of bricks.

That very night in Noah’s room a storm grew and grew -
and grew until his ceiling hung with clouds and the walls became the world all around
and an ocean tumbled by.

The ark of bricks was too heavy for sailing, so it sank to the ocean's floor and there it sat. And all the creatures of the sea escaped the ark and swam in the ocean.

The ark of sticks could not withstand the salt of the ocean nor the huffs and puffs of the storm, so it broke into many pieces. And all the birds flew into the sky, and used the floating sticks as perches when they could fly no more.

But the storm couldn't blow down the ark of wood, on which Noah himself and the beasts of the land all took shelter, and it sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks and almost over 40 days.

And when it came to the place where the wild things could land, they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
till Noah said “BE STILL!” and tamed them with the magic trick
of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once
and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all
and made him king of all wild things.

Then all around from far away across the world
Noah smelled a pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I be wicked, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood"
so he gave up being king of where the wild things now were.

And Noah stepped into his ark of wood and waved good-bye
and sailed back over 40 days and in and out of weeks and through a day
and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him with a note from his Mother saying "Never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done and please clean this purple mess from your walls before you eat your dinner."

And it was still hot even after he was done.

Relationships are like Bikes

The seven-year-old learned to ride a bike over the last few weeks.

She's normally afraid of getting hurt, but in this case she found a deep well of determination: She fell off the bike, got back on, fell again, got back on again, dealt with the bumps and bruises and scrapes, and slowly but surely learned.

She's a proud kid and doesn't like to be bad at something. Doesn't like it one bit. And in this case she had two choices: Give up on the tantalizing prospect of riding on her own, or keep trying despite the embarrassment of falling down in front of others, the (apparent only to her) shame of accepting that she couldn't do something that other kids her age can, and the need to slow herself down and take the time to learn. Unlike playing Crazy Eights, nobody else could give her this victory...it was up to her to persevere.

Learning to swim or to skate was a similar experience, but we jumped those hurdles years ago when she was small and wobbly and expected to be clumsy and mistake-prone. Now she's a big kid and this was not easy for her.

We all learned to ride bikes at some point in our life. We all got bruised. We all sucked at it until we didn't. We all persevered. And then in a magical moment for each of us, it came together and we were suddenly able to do it. 

---

Enough about bikes. Let's talk about relationships.

Relationships are like bikes.

Relationships are hard. They give you bumps and bruises and scrapes. They take determination and perseverance. 

When you're at the 'learning' phase of a new relationship, everything's wobbly and precarious. It's easy to make a mistake and sometimes it's the right thing to do to give up. If it looks like a worthwhile relationship though, you've got to work hard to create the conditions where that magical moment can finally arrive and it's suddenly easy (while still requiring diligence, of course). A great relationship is a tantalizing prospect and so it's ultimately worth the effort.

Family relationships are another matter. They aren't a choice and there isn't a real learning phase. Family relationships are just there; they always were and they always will be. When they get wobbly and precarious, the bumps and bruises and scrapes are sometimes even more painful because this kind of relationship is usually so stable that you don't even have to think about it... Now, seemingly out of the blue, you find yourself sitting on the pavement, wheels spinning in the air behind you, head spinning too, in pain, and completely confused by what just happened.

It might have been a stupid little stone that you didn't notice until it was too late that threw everything off balance, but you're not sitting there thinking about the stone. It's the stupid bike. And stupid you. And the feeling of betrayal. And your bruised butt. And your bruised pride.

Do you climb back on (figuratively) and make it right again? Or do you dust yourself off and walk home sulking and angry, possibly kicking the stupid bike on the way?

Depends on whether you want the bike anymore.

But the answer to that lies in the inadequacy of the bike analogy, I think. It's probably more accurate to compare a fall-out with a close family member to suddenly being unable to walk. You might leave a bike behind, but you're not going to accept being unable to walk anymore...

Are you?

David Launches a New Word: Bzik

As promised in this post's title, my intention today is to launch (re-launch?) a word that I learned years ago from my parents that seems to have since disappeared: "Bzik".

Last March I was in a conversation with a couple of colleagues and one of them was talking about something that drives her crazy. I said, "That sounds like a bzik". She didn't know what I was talking about so someone else in the car did some Googling and came up empty, mostly because we had no idea of its spelling. I called my Mom while still in the car with these people (given that I knew for sure that she knew the word) and on speaker-phone she answered "Hi Lover Dover!" and then went on to say that she knew the word but didn't know how it was spelled either.

That sent me off on a search that quickly confirmed what I was beginning to suspect: There was a hole in the Internet. The word simply wasn't out there. I posted on Facebook and nobody could help me, though several tried.

Finally, on March 6th at 10:48 am Eastern, I found it in a Polish dictionary:  
Bzik [b'źik] (think of the 'zh' in Brezhnev, if that helps).


What's it mean?  

First of all its a noun. I'd explain it as a light madness or mania; a petty annoyance taken to the level of an eccentricity. A pet peeve on steroids.

It's something you have. It's a part of you. It's a defining characteristic.

Instead of using it in a sentence, I'll give you some examples:

• One of my daughters' bziks is "mouth noises". It drives her crazy when people slurp their soup, swish their saliva around, or...you name it.
• Another of my daughters has a bzik related to being shushed. I wouldn't call her disgust related to compost or sink-strainer-residue a bzik (just by way of comparison); that's more of a revulsion than a mania. It's also a convenient excuse.
• Amongst her thousands of bziks, my wife has a visceral reaction - a madness so to speak - when it comes to clothes on the floor. Or maybe a better example, because it's more eccentric, is her bzik related to upside-down loaves of bread. I kid you not - try inverting a loaf of bread around her some time and you'll see what I mean.

It's actually quite therapeutic to come to grips with your own bziks (and fun to call someone else on theirs). Attaching that label let's you manage bzik-related encounters with significantly more grace. It allows you to discuss it. To give it form. To neatly step around it as you navigate life.

And, by the way, when it comes to the bziks of your loved ones - they're a lot of fun to activate; each bzik is a button just waiting to be pressed.

Thankfully, I was born bzik-free. Nothing bothers me. I especially don't have a bzik related to careless spelling and grammar. People borrowing my stuff without asking doesn't affect me one bit. Being told what to do doesn't get under my skin at ALL. IT DOESN'T DRIVE ME AT ALL CRAZY WHEN F*ING INCONSIDERATE A*HOLE DRIVERS STOP AT A LIGHT IN THE RIGHT-TURN LANE WHEN THEY'RE NOT EVEN TURNING AND THEY CLEARLY SEE YOUR SIGNAL LIGHT FLASHING AND HAVE AN EMPTY LANE TO THEIR LEFT.

Anyhoo. You get the picture.

Please spread the word. Let's bring it back to life. Let's fix the hole in the Internet.

You may now return to your day...David

Caught a Shooting Star

Years ago, when my older two daughters were about the youngest's current age (7 and 9? 5 and 7?), we heard about the Perseids Meteor Shower and spent an hour-or-so in the backyard one night, lying on sleeping bags and watching for shooting stars. We saw a few, and I believe both of them still remember that night as a magical one.

So when I read that the Perseids would be putting on a show starting late last month and peaking on  the morning of August 12th, I felt a deep obligation to give the 7-year-old the same experience.

We made our plans, we looked at the calendar and saw that August 11th was a Thursday, and we talked about it being okay to stay up late that night. We even tried to catch some preliminary glimpses on the Fridays and Saturdays leading up to the big night.

She dubbed August 11th "Micaela's Day" because that would be the day that she finally realized her dream of seeing a shooting star.

Waiting out there on our back patio one night last week, she asked me if there was a particular way one was supposed to make a wish on a shooting star (you know, akin to "Star light star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may I wish I might have the wish I wish tonight"). We came up with "Shooting star, shooting star, take my wish from where you are..." as an alternative lead-in.

Each night that we went out there, getting ready for the 11th and hoping for a sneak preview, she'd use her "first star I see tonight" wish to wish for a shooting star. I asked her, "What will your wish be when you do see a shooting star? To see another one?" She thought that was just about the funniest thing she'd ever heard.

In all the lead-up, one shooting star was seen...and that by me. So the 11th gained more and more significance as the time when it would finally happen for her.

Then, as you must know if you live in the GTA, last night turned out to be a cloudy, cloudy night with on-and-off drizzle. I sent her to bed angry and sad after staying up a bit later than usual watching tv and praying that the sky would clear.

Now, what I failed to mention so far is that EVERY SINGLE DAY for the last couple of weeks, I have been sneaking out onto the back patio some time between 4 and 5 am (when I do my daily routine of waking up too early without meaning to) to see if there was anything to see. Aside from some bats, which each morning freaked me out enough to send me back indoors... nothing.

And then today, August 12th at 3:50 am, I opened my eyes and wondered if the skies had cleared yet. I snuck downstairs, peeked out the window, and lo and behold - a few clouds, but mostly stars.

I lay down on one of our gravity chairs to see if there would, indeed, be a show. Within 3 minutes I witnessed the most glorious, clear, slow-moving, shooting star EVER. Decision-time: Do I wake her up or pretend it never happened.

If you know me, you know what I decided. I shook her gently and dragged her out of a deep, deep sleep: "Wanna see your shooting star baby?"

She awoke, leapt out of bed, grabbed my hand, and we made a dash for the patio. I grabbed a couple of blankets and we took our respective places on the gravity chairs.

It was stinking humid but a cool breeze made it bearable.

We waited. And waited. She mumbled a "star light, star bright..." asking once again for a shooting star.

And then it happened. A quick flash, a split-second, and a father-and-daughter gasp.

"Did you see it?!?" I asked her. "I think so, but I forgot to make a wish. Can we wait for another one?"

A few more minutes, and then we got a much better one.

I heard her quietly reciting "Shooting star, shooting star, take my wish from where you are..." I don't know what she wished for and, of course, she didn't tell me. Maybe one day she will.

As I put her back in bed she whispered "You're the best daddy ever" and gave me a blissful hug.

Wishes granted, both hers and mine.

Knowing us, we'll be out there again tonight to try for one more bit of magic. You should too.

(This image is from the Web, there's no way I'd hide behind a camera at a moment like this).

Happy 30th Birthday to My Wife

(For the purposes of today's post, imagine that we live in an alternate universe where human beings all have 17 fingers and thumbs - 8 on their right hand and 9 on their left. In that universe, everything else is exactly the same as in our universe except people have a much easier time distinguishing between right and left AND the numeral system is base 17. In that universe, my wife is celebrating her 30th birthday today!)

On this, the 30th birthday of my dear sweet wife, I offer her 17 reasons that I love her...

1. She sleeps with her cell phone beside her bed in case one of her daughters needs her in the middle of the night and genuinely offers them carte blanche to call any time.
2. She has three "blood" daughters and countless others who consider her a second Mom.
3. She makes instant friends everywhere she goes - most recently while waiting in the Returns line at IKEA and standing in a parking lot at Niagara-on-the-Lake. Moreover, she will recognize and remember these instant friends if she ever runs into them again.
4. She can walk into the house and instantly detect that something is out of place, even if it's as small as a shot glass on the dining room table and not currently in her line of sight.
5. "Six-and-a-half of one, half-dozen of another".
6. She can be on Episode 3 of a series we're watching together when I go to bed, and Episode 8 by the time we sit down to watch again the following night. Furthermore, she will happily re-watch each Episode in order to hide the fact that she went on without me.
7. "I'm not weird, I'm just not like everyone else".
8. She is the most formidable customer in the world, and wins pitched battles with cable companies, banks, home renovators, window installers, and the like over any amount of money that she feels she was overcharged. She will then turn around and empty her wallet for anyone on the street who is in need.
9. Even at 30, she will happily grab a fake microphone and dance like nobody's watching when a song she loves comes on.
10. She likes it when people hurt themselves in funny ways (see earlier blog post).
11. She will not sit down at the end of a long day until the house is in perfect shape or until she can no longer physically continue to stand.
12. Weeks after she discovers that somebody has hacked her phone so that spellcheck replaces the word "love" with "fart", I continue to get texts from her that say "I fart you".
13. She is the world's greatest hugger. Ask anyone.
14. She gave up a life of freedom to start over with a third daughter and has never looked back.
15. Her happiest place in the world is our family room couch.
16. Keep your penny, her thoughts are always free.
17. She is mine and always will be.

While I have not yet scratched the surface on the reasons I love my wife, I've run out of fingers and thumbs to count on so I'll stop there. Next time, I'll use my 23 toes to keep going.

Love you honey bunny...David

Dear LinkedIn...I Don't Like You

I remember when my Dad brought home his very first calculator. It cost a fortune and was capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and nothing else. (Well, that's not completely true: You could also do things like type in "7734" and then turn it upside down and show your friends what you had written.)

I remember his first "luggable" computer. It was called a "luggable" because it was moveable from place to place, but its manufacturers couldn't quite find it in themselves to call it "portable". (It was portable, but in the way that a piano is portable, which is to say it was basically a desktop computer with a handle on it.)

I remember when we got our first game console. It played one game: Pong. That game consisted of two lines and a dot (unlike our first hand-held game console, which was a football game consisting of lots of dots and no lines). And by the way, I remember that both Pong and the handheld football game were amazingly fun and addictive.

I remember writing a high-school debate speech with my friend Carrie on my Dad's office "word processor". That was a machine the size of a filing cabinet with a keyboard and an orange and brown (or was it black and green?) screen. It did one thing and one thing only...word processing.

I remember in my first part-time job at my Dad's office getting a chance to touch his brand new IBM PC AT ("Advanced Technology") which was breathtakingly fast and had a seemingly exhaustible amount of memory (16K). I remember that with all of the computers back then, when you first arrived in the office each morning you'd boot it up, then go downstairs and buy yourself a coffee, say good morning to people, and head back to your desk about 20 minutes later and wait while it finished loading.

I remember being excited by the AT because back at high school in our computer science class, we were learning all about programming using punch cards and a PDP-11. I also remember entering a contest in high school to name the brand new PDP-11, winning by acclamation (having submitted the only entry), and having my name and the new name for the PDP-11 announced to the whole school. I can't quite remember what that did to my social status, but I can only assume it made me even cooler than I already was.

I remember when the user interface that confronted you each morning, after your PC had finally come to life, looked like this:

Ahhh...the good old days. 

Because back then, software knew its place. It sucked. It crashed all the time. It was slow. It didn't do much. BUT, it knew its place: I was the master and it was my servant; I was the user and it was the "used". I overpaid to buy my software, and my software was grateful to have been bought by me.

Everything else about the experience was horrible. But I never once felt like the software was using me (abusing, maybe).

Fast-forward to present day and the reason for this post: I have a big hate-on for LinkedIn. 

I've been quiet about this because so many people seem to like it and put it to good use (recruiting, networking, job-hunting, etc.) and I don't like bashing something that some people really rely on for important things. But I can't hold my tongue any more.

The very first time I used it (and that was relatively early on) I felt tricked into opening up my rolodex so that it could send a bunch of e-mails to a bunch of people with whom I almost never communicated. I didn't understand what it was asking me in whatever that first-entry tutorial put in front of me, and the next thing I knew it was reaching out to a bunch of people on my behalf and inviting them in my name to sign-up. How stupid of me not to understand.

Another time, it asked me to endorse my wife's skills. Is she a good Project Manager? Youbetcha. Consultant? Of course. Educator? Nobody better. And so on. Next thing I knew, everyone she knows on LinkedIn was hearing from me. What? I didn't know I was doing that! You didn't ask me that!

A few times now, I've received an onslaught of congratulatory e-mails for anniversaries I didn't know I was celebrating. This happened again just last week in fact (I still don't know what anniversary it was). So thank you everybody for the congratulations, I feel blessed on this occasion of my (???) that so many of you took the time to think of me. And thank you LinkedIn for unilaterally deciding that I wanted everyone notified. Next time, let me know what milestone it is please.

And so on.

If Facebook is a sweet little old lady who invites you to sit on the couch next to her, showing you album after album from the last seven decades while you slowly dissolve the sugar-free candy she offered you, LinkedIn is a vampire that shows up at your door and tries to trick you into inviting it in. Once inside, it rifles through your stuff while you have your back turned ("Blah. I vant a glass of bl...I mean water. If you'd please get me some. Blah") and then stands outside your house shouting out whatever it has learned about you.

Every time I have an encounter with LinkedIn, I come away feeling used.

I just went into my settings to finally turn off all the things that I (by default) gave it permission to do, and I couldn't find much. I certainly turned off "Notifying connections when you're in the news", but the rest of it I couldn't find as I quickly and easily as I should be able to. (I was looking for an overarching one that says: "Ask permission before taking liberties with my stuff".)

So why don't I just shuck my account altogether? Because having an account is a business necessity where I work. It's one of the social media platforms on which a company must be present if it is to be relevant these days. I will drop my account the minute I am allowed to.

Know your place LinkedIn. Serve me, and not the other way around. Ask me in clear and concise questions what I feel comfortable having you do. Check with me before sharing things about me with others. Enable me to use you in a way that is friendly, easy, and non-obtrusive. Stay out of my house unless you're invited in. 

You make me pine for the days of 20-minute reboots, luggable computers, and Pong. 

Blah.