Somebody's about to take it all away, but we don't know who they are, and millions of women are getting pasta next week. It's all coming true, and you heard it here first... Only MILFs need apply. Mothers’ Day is coming up and I checked out the ads to see what’s trending this year. So, based on the promotions I’m seeing, you’re in luck if you’re a mom who is 32 or younger, ridiculously hot, and have a four-year-old blond child who can afford to buy you a diamond pendant. For the rest of the moms, it’s macaroni art at best. Finished already? I really don’t understand all the fuss about the Kentucky Derby. All those people prepping for months, showing up in fancy clothes, competing for the best cuisine, and then the main event is over in two minutes. Reminds me of my honeymoon. Stop that…who? I know a bunch of successful guys who have this fear that is almost never front and center, but often buzzing in the background: Somehow, somebody is going to take it away. It’s almost never a specific somebody, but there is a sense of unease about success, that it is unearned or arbitrary and that it can disappear much more quickly than it arrived. I suspect I know even more people who are not as successful and have the same insecurity. That’s why it resonates when they’re told there are evil forces plotting to take away everything they have. If my successful friends can host that fear, how much more so for people who are less financially/socially/culturally secure? Smarter than Alfred. When you really think about it, Einstein’s most famous formula is actually pretty stupid, or at least as basic as it gets. We can measure mass and we can measure the speed of light, so E is just whatever MCC is. That’s no smarter than my special formula: Happiness = Beer times pizza. Are they commute-worthy? Speaking of formulas, we need a new calculation for declining an invitation when the time spent in transit is greater than the time spent at the actual event. I’m thinking one-to-one: two hours of transit for a two-hour movie or play or baseball game or summer festival; four hours for a wedding, bar mitzvah or any dinner with a really good cocktail hour. We’ll call it the commuter quotient and every host must accept it as a completely legitimate reason for rejection. Pre-forgiving the bad debt. Two of the biggest tsunamis on my social feeds last month were from people arguing about taxpayer subsidies for a new stadium for the Chicago Bears and student loan forgiveness. Shockingly, and by “shocking,” I mean “right on cue,” many people in favor of throwing taxpayer dollars at billionaire club owners are violently opposed to writing off debts for graduates who will never know the luxury of two-ply tissue. Taxpayers have been screwed over and over by sports teams and large corporations that promise huge financial returns that never materialize from “taxpayer investments,” but it’s a lesson we’ll learn at about the same time Charlie Brown stops flailing at the football. Intentionally idle. Quite often, the hardest thing to do is nothing, to wait it out, to refrain from getting in the middle and adding new complications. Some problems have no solution, some situations simply require time for resolution, and sometimes, just maybe, all our help just makes things worse. Also, “forbearance” sounds much more selfless than “laziness.” Pointed critique. I came back from a trip recently and I noticed that a quarter of my photos included people pointing at something. Mostly, it was the guides on our visit and I wanted the pictures to be a bit more dramatic, so I waited until they were gesturing before I took the shot. Someday, an archaeologist is going to look at my pictures and think we walked around all day pointing at things. It’s a lot like the selfies that will convince them we were always looking up and smiling, even though we appear to have had only one arm. You really think somebody likes me! Secretly, I love it when they tell us to silence our cell phones at the start of the movie. It feels so good to be included among those who might actually receive a phone call one of these days. We'll be visiting college graduation next week and you won't want to miss it, so be sure to click here to subscribe.
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There was this guy who I liked a lot who gave me a major boost in life, and then he screwed me royally and sent me on a major downward spiral. I miss him a lot, and I resent him like crazy, without any contradiction in having both emotions at the same time. There’s a guy I like a lot, although we disagree on almost everything and he has a tendency to lecture me about my lapses in judgment. Actually, there are a bunch of guys like that. Some think I’m too liberal and some think I’m too conservative and all of them know I’d be better off if I recognized the truth that only they possess and follow their lead. Relationships are complicated that way. We all have somebody in our lives, most likely several somebodies, who give and take, build and destroy, advance and retard. People will ask why we still engage with them and we’ll shrug and say there’s more positive than negative. At the same time, people will ask why they still engage with us and they’ll shrug and say there’s more positive than negative. And we’ll both be right about that balance. We forgive their trespasses and they forgive ours, because that’s what it takes to maintain a relationship. We tell the critics they don’t really know the person, when in fact they do, just as we do, and we let it go. We’ll save our vitriol and condemnation for some stranger who uses the wrong word in a post, because that’s who we are now, but we’ll let it slide for the people who make us laugh or make us feel safe or, at least, share some of their fries. Nothing’s going to change, at least 99.99% of the time, because we’re all human and have our opinions and we’ve mostly given up on the idea of bringing the other person into the light. And we live with it, or else we would have no friends at all. Because, let’s face it, we can’t find people who agree with us about everything, even if we dive into the deepest silo. Still, it does happen from time to time that an opinion changes and a position shifts. It’s seldom a U-turn, but no less real. The other guy is suddenly saying things closer to your view of the world and, while they’ll deny it, they’re finally, finally listening to reason. Yes, it’s rare, but it’s oh, so rewarding. Maybe they’ve grown as a human being, maybe my incredible wisdom is sinking in, maybe I’ve started a ripple effect that will change the world. And maybe I’m kidding myself. You never know. In the meantime, maybe they’ll share some of their fries. Just in case one of these unnamed people decides to save the world and gives me 100% credit for their transformation, you’ll want to be a subscriber who hears about it right away. Just click here to make it so. Not only do oldsters write in a secret code called cursive, we’re also coming up with hip new lingo and a cure for short-term memory loss. Making it less of a drag getting old this week…
While you're waiting to join the class-action list of plaintiffs, take a moment to click here to subscribe for more brilliant ideas for revenge. The guy on the next barstool is curious about the photos I’m taking, so I explain it’s an exercise I do every so often, sitting in one place and finding something picworthy from wherever I’m perched. I show him the shot I took of the champagne flutes, refracted through a water glass, and then we veer off into a conversation about cameras, motorcycles, politics, and abortion. Turns out, he owns one of the condos in the hotel complex where we’re staying and he sells motorcycles, among other things, to put food on the table. I get the feeling he can afford much fancier food than he’s munching on at the moment, but he also seems to enjoy being in a place where everybody knows his name. He took some photos when he was younger, drifted away from it, has considered getting back into it, but life intervenes and you move in different directions. We talk about our kids, who are relatively close in age, their careers and life choices, the way our roles change as we and our children get older, and the complexities of business. I tell him a bit about my career and he gives me a brief tutorial on the motorcycle industry, which leads us into the challenges of updating a brand and appealing to a new generation of buyers. Then we're deep into marketing, supply chain management and the damage that the finance guys have wreaked on American industry. I tell him re-shoring and the rebuilding of infrastructure are big investment themes for me, now that the Chips and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are generating results. His state is one of the bigger beneficiaries, but he isn’t all that familiar with them, and I’m not surprised. Based on some of the phrases he uses, I know at least one source of his news, and Biden successes aren’t a primary topic over there. So, now we’re talking politics, focusing on the misplaced incentives that make it more profitable, literally, to create problems than to solve them. We agree that Congress is pretty ineffective at addressing the issues that are most critical, that there’s more grandstanding than real effort in political circles, and there's a gigantic gap where common sense should be. Inevitably, it seems, we end up on abortion. Both of us believe life begins at conception, but neither of us thinks a woman should be forced to carry a dead fetus to term. He said he was opposed to all the proposals for post-birth abortions and I said I would be opposed, too, if that really was a thing. Between those points of agreement, we didn’t quite find a bright line that divides what’s acceptable or not for the two of us. And by “us,” I’m talking about two men sitting at a bar...pretty much a textbook definition of having no skin in the game. Ninety minutes later, we both have somewhere else to be and some of the world’s problems will need to wait until another pair of old guys grab our stools. As I’m heading out, it occurs to me that it’s incredibly easy to have a congenial conversation with a stranger, to talk about challenging issues without getting angry, to see things differently without seeing an enemy. Clearly, I should spend more time in saloons. I’m doing a good job of keeping up on the news these days, but I’m not completely sure that any of it makes sense. For instance…
A friend of mine died more than a year ago, but I was too busy to notice. We worked together for a while, stayed in touch over the years, saw each other every six months or so, and then the visits became less frequent. We moved into the city, he and his wife moved farther into the suburbs, we’d find opportunities to meet in the middle somewhere, but neither of us pursued the connection with the utmost zeal. Then he took ill, an increasingly common development as my friends and I get older. I went out to visit, as he couldn’t drive anymore, and we had a couples dinner or two, but that was clearly a long, long time ago. I knew he was getting worse, I wrote myself a note to check in on him, and then I made another note and another. I never actually checked in, but I was very diligent about writing new notes. And one day, it was too late. Not that I knew about it, since I was so busy writing reminder notes. I thought about the challenges his wife was facing, I thought about his descent into a hellish disease, I thought about the small support a check-in call might offer. But there’s a huge difference between thinking and doing and I didn't bridge the gap. Since the days when everyone lived in the same cave and spoke the same five words, it has never been easier to stay in touch than it is today. We can Zoom or conference, text or email, make a phone call or jump in a ride-share 24/7. And yet, it seems we are more distanced in many ways, unable to find the time or the drive to connect. Sometimes we spend more time making the plans than we actually spend together. Sometimes, we spend more time writing reminders to ourselves than we’d need to make the damned call. There’s always tomorrow, until there isn’t. In this case, nearly 600 tomorrows have elapsed since the last one that might have mattered. I have no idea what I would have said on the call I never made. People sometimes say it’s important to say goodbye, but that always seems more of a benefit to the person who’s staying than for the one about to depart. The visitor checks a box, while the patient knows they will never hear from their contact for as long as they live. I’ve done the last-goodbye visit more than once and I’ve always felt it was the right thing to do in the specific circumstances with the specific people. Usually, I try to avoid any indication that I don’t expect to return, even if we both know it’s the final conversation. This time was different, because I didn’t bother at all. Now I’m wondering if I should do anything or let it lie. Should I call his widow and express condolences, or does my lengthy absence make things worse? “Yes, I ignored you and your husband, my friend, for so long that he died more than a year ago and I never even noticed, but isn’t it great that I’m noticing now?” Does it reopen a wound to remind her of the people who didn’t show up when it mattered? Am I calling to help her or just to assuage my own guilt? Or, does any expression of sympathy help with the healing, even if it comes much too late from a pretty crappy friend? Gotta ponder that for a while. Maybe I’ll write myself a note. |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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