Itinerant's Law #41: The shorter the flight, the greater your
frustration with airport inefficiencies.
Provenance: Flights between St. Louis and Chicago
Basis: Arrival time at airport before flight: 2 hours; seat assignment
due to flight being oversold: middle; t-shirt on the guy sitting next
to you: "Northwestern Football Bench Press Champion 2008; time spent at baggage claim due to overhead space being full: 40 minutes; actual flight time: 47 minutes. Temper: red-line and rising.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Itinerant = business traveler
From Dictionary.com:
i·tin·er·ant [ahy-tin-er-uh nt]
–adjective
i·tin·er·ant [ahy-tin-er-uh nt]
ər
–adjective
1. traveling from place to place, esp. on a circuit, as a minister, judge, or sales representative; itinerating; journeying.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Inventing Color
My daughter is 8 months old this week. I was speaking with a friend of mine at lunch a while back, and he asked me how it was going, you know, being a dad. What it was like. I replied it requires the most rigorous self-discipline I am capable of to not talk about her all the time . . . to not regurgitate the explicit details of every micro-milestone she achieves. It is actually, physically, hard to do. I have to completely be conscious that a request to see a recent photo of her is really a request to see at most 2-3 pictures. Not the 53 I immediately want to display. Also, to constantly remind myself that her small coos and long naps are only interesting to maybe 5 people in the entire world . . . and that is if I include the grandparents.
As a single guy, then later as a proud four-year member of the DINK ("Dual Income, No Kids" for the uninitiated) club once married, I was constantly annoyed by one of the tics common to all new parents--the frequency with which they would assert some variation of the following: "You just won't understand what I mean until you're a father." And this disqualifier would almost always follow a lengthy story or description of how great and fulfilling it was to be a parent, which would then be immediately deconstructed by the qualification that I am incapable of understanding what was just described. Then why did I just listen? There must be several hours of my life I could recover if not forced to endure these self-described incomprehensible anecdotes.
In fatherhood, however, I've found the immense compulsion; the need to share these types of stories is almost uncontainable. So I suppose I understand now. I have still vowed not to do it. I try very hard not to indulge that urge.
So it was that I was sitting there with my buddy at lunch, and he began to press me on this topic which defies description, as he has no kids-- and the truth is, there are just things you can't comprehend except through experience. Like going 200 miles per hour in a car. Sky diving. Getting hit in the balls by something traveling at great speed . . . the English language fails us here. It has no capacity to accurately capture and convey these things.
I looked at my friend and said, here is what it's like: try to invent a new color.
I asked him to conceptualize a brand new spectrum on the rainbow, using nothing from our known palette to construct it. Invent a color. It's impossible.
This is what it's like to be a father. To look at your little girl and having the very sight of her tap a previously undiscovered internal reservoir of emotion, only to instantly realize that this emotion is unlike any other you have ever felt. Language . . . and even imagination fail that request. It is instant folly.
Pal, I said . . . defeated . . . you just won't understand what I mean until you're a dad.
As a single guy, then later as a proud four-year member of the DINK ("Dual Income, No Kids" for the uninitiated) club once married, I was constantly annoyed by one of the tics common to all new parents--the frequency with which they would assert some variation of the following: "You just won't understand what I mean until you're a father." And this disqualifier would almost always follow a lengthy story or description of how great and fulfilling it was to be a parent, which would then be immediately deconstructed by the qualification that I am incapable of understanding what was just described. Then why did I just listen? There must be several hours of my life I could recover if not forced to endure these self-described incomprehensible anecdotes.
In fatherhood, however, I've found the immense compulsion; the need to share these types of stories is almost uncontainable. So I suppose I understand now. I have still vowed not to do it. I try very hard not to indulge that urge.
So it was that I was sitting there with my buddy at lunch, and he began to press me on this topic which defies description, as he has no kids-- and the truth is, there are just things you can't comprehend except through experience. Like going 200 miles per hour in a car. Sky diving. Getting hit in the balls by something traveling at great speed . . . the English language fails us here. It has no capacity to accurately capture and convey these things.
I looked at my friend and said, here is what it's like: try to invent a new color.
I asked him to conceptualize a brand new spectrum on the rainbow, using nothing from our known palette to construct it. Invent a color. It's impossible.
This is what it's like to be a father. To look at your little girl and having the very sight of her tap a previously undiscovered internal reservoir of emotion, only to instantly realize that this emotion is unlike any other you have ever felt. Language . . . and even imagination fail that request. It is instant folly.
Pal, I said . . . defeated . . . you just won't understand what I mean until you're a dad.
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