When Did It All Change?

Perhaps I was away when it happened.  Or caught up in a good football game.  Or on the can.

At some point in time Americans became whiners.  Case in point: a Dr Pepper commercial, wherein young, college-aged people bemoan the difficulties of paying for and getting through college.  Yeah, I know.  You want to know how I know?  Because that's what I did:

• I didn't know how I was going to pay for college (but I went anyway and found ways to make it happen)
• I had to work 5 or more days per week (I didn't have scholarships or grants - but I knew how to make a pizza)
• I did NOT attend college for altruistic reasons.  I wanted to make great wadges of cash.

So it's discouraging to see these young people looking weepily into the camera saying they don't know how to pay for college and have to work.  It's also discouraging to hear them talk about how much they want to help their fellow man.

Let me explain that last bit.  I may have wanted college for free and I am earning decent-sized wadges of cash.  But by having to work hard for my degree and income I learned a great deal about myself and what matters in life.  What really matters is that I help those closest to me.  The absolute best reason to attend college, even when it's difficult, was so I could be a good husband and father.  What better way to contribute to your community than to have a strong family?

So when did we become a nation of whiners?  Is this the result of so many years of participation trophies?  The second something isn't just handed to a young person they stare back in disbelief and ask, "you mean I have to work for this?"  When I was young, hard work was expected for anyone who wanted to achieve something, be it serving the community or supporting a family.

You're Complaining to the Wrong Person

Is the American dream to go to college? Is it to be better off than our parents? Or is it just to perform the act of going to college so you can have a degree in whatever suits your fancy and then waiting for society to clap you on the back and start handing you paychecks?

When I was finishing high school we all received an interesting piece of paper that listed the average starting salaries for various college majors. Being a nerdy math nerd and very much wanting to be an engineer I was pleased that engineering degrees equaled pretty sweet starting salaries. Also, being a nerdy math nerd, I didn't spend a whole lot of time thinking about those liberal arts college majors that yielded careers with less than half the starting salary. I was thinking, of course, more about buying cool stereos and fast cars with the shiny new job my degree would get me. But, as it happens, the same job that did, indeed, bring cool stereos and fast cars (and, coincidentally, one fast car with a very cool stereo) also enabled me to do crazy things like support a wife and kids and pay the light bill (as my parents called it).

Now I see this on the Internet:

Are you really going to complain to those of us with common sense, or really just sense enough to realize that a degree in Classical Studies with a minor in Latin is the facial tattoo of college degrees? It all but guarantees you won't ever pay federal taxes because you'll never earn enough money to have to pay them.

The American nightmare isn't people unable to find a job with a degree in Classical Studies. It's society not informing our youth that your job prospects will be nearly zero if one has a degree in Classical Studies. Remember all those horrible TV shows where the mean parents told their kids that they won't amount to anything with an art degree. Well, what they really meant is that you can still be a great wife and a great mom, but you're going to have to do it on a minimum wage budget. And that will suck.

By the way, I went to high school with liberals. Near as I can tell they're still liberals and they voted for Obama. Career choices? Doctors, nurses, lawyers and engineers. And still some of the most creative and wonderful people I have had the honor of knowing.

Thank You Sgt. Pepper

Until I was about 11 or 12 I lived in a monaural world. A world of clock radios and 13" black and white TVs. We had a stereo, but it was usually only used at Christmas for a stack of Firestone Christmas albums.

Then one time I was spending the weekend at my dad's and asked if he had any music I could listen to. So he gets down this record and cues it up. Then he hands me a pair of huge '80s over-the-ear headphone and changed my life forever. I like to think that it wasn't just the experience of hearing true stereo for the first time, but also hearing one of best albums ever recorded by the Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.



From that point on I consumed music. I also yearned for better and higher quality systems for my listening pleasure. I didn't have much money, but I used my strawberry picking money one summer to buy a huge boom box and even got a Walkman for Christmas one year. I've plateaued nicely on the equipment and haven't gone the way of some audiophiles. Either I am not one, or managed to let my finances dictate that area of my life. It pains me to report that the integrated amplifier I bought when I graduated from high school has finally bit the dust. And the tweeters on the Polk Audio Monitor 5Bs I bought with my friend Eric the first time I drove into the Portland area without grownups have tweeted their last.

Fortunately, I am not without:

Rotel RB-985 THX-certified 5-channel power amplifier
Rotel RSP-1066 Surround Processor/Preamp
Polk Audio RT-8 tower speakers
psb Alpha Sub-Zero 6 powered subwoofer

Funny thing is I had the amp and speakers long before I had the preamp. While the cinema performance was excellent, the stereo was flat and dead. That all went away with the 1066. Now the whole set up sings in both 2- and 5-channel.

Last thing I listened to in glorious stereo (and loud!):

"When Will You Die For the Last Time In My Dreams"
-Polvo, Exploded Drawing
1996, Touch & Go Records

#OccupyMatt

Protest in Hotel Room Verges on Violence

18 October 2011

Goldsboro, NC - A single man protesting against debt and crony capitalism has threatened to take himself outside for a "good old-fashioned Southern butt-whooping" over what he believes are serious breaches of personal responsibility.

"Matt has not made the best financial decisions and my debt is the direct result of those decisions," said Matt, oddly referring to himself in the third person. Matt cited his own desire for a fast car and a house as examples of not living within his means.

"Rather than carefully considering all the implications of home-ownership, such as lack of mobility and the expense of maintenance (those gutters don't clean themselves!), Matt bought a house near the peak of the housing boom," said Matt. "Now I'm stuck with a mortgage to pay and live more than an hour from work."

When asked why he still makes the payments on the house despite owing more than it's worth, Matt replied, "When Matt borrowed the money he agreed to pay it back. None of the loan documents implied that it was no longer necessary to make payments when it didn't feel good."

"Matt needs to bail out Matt," said Matt regarding a solution to the problem. "When Matt lives within or, even better, below his means the situation will correct itself. We even expect surpluses over the long-haul."

Traveling Sucks

Some random thoughts on traveling in this day and age:

• Young(er) people don't know how to turn off their fancy smart phones. (Hint: putting it in airplane mode is not turning it off. Turning it off is turning it off.)
• An $8 fruit and cheese platter that sounds ridiculous on the ground is a luxurious feast halfway through a 4-hour flight
• If you have a bladder the size of a walnut, request an aisle seat
• Zone 2 people don't like having to wade through a crowd of zone 4 and 5 people to board the plane
• Your bag will come back around; no need to bowl people over trying to get it. It's called a carrousel for a reason
• I will shed no tears when you have to check your suitcase because the overhead bins are full after I paid $60 to check my bags at check-in
  
• No one has to use the lavatory until the seat belt sign comes on
• No one has any problem calling the bathroom a lavatory because it's on an airplane

Naming It

For years and years I have had an aversion to certain sounds like other people chewing or typing. My reaction went beyond annoyance. I used to share on office with two other people, one of whom typed very fast on a very "clicky" keyboard. I could not stand it. Most of the time I worked with my headphones on to drown it out. If I couldn't do that I would literally panic. All I wanted in the world at that moment was for the sound to stop. If I could have I would have destroyed her keyboard or jumped out a window. It was absolute fight or flight. Fortunately the office had a door so I used that to get away and calm down.

When I would express what was happening to me people would just say I was being anal or over-reacting. But I don't think so. I have researched this on and off over the years and recently I discovered a name for this: misophonia or selective sound sensitivity.

The first time I read an article describing my symptoms and giving them a name I wept. My condition didn't go away, but at least I knew I wasn't crazy. Okay, I am crazy, but crazy with a name is much better than just crazy.

The NY Times recently featured the condition in an article and it was on the Today Show.

If you're curious, there's more information here.

What it's All About

I saw a most horrific sight today when I dropped off my daughter at school this morning (and just for the record, I'm not one of those helicopter parents; we live across the street and I work from home so it's pretty convenient). Standing in front of a line outside a classroom was a first or second grade girl with a T-shirt proclaiming in huge lettering:

"ENOUGH ABOUT YOU LET'S TALK ABOUT ME!"

It made me throw up a little in the back of my throat. If my daughter wanted a shirt like that I would buy it just so I could burn it in front of her while casually explaining that, indeed, it's not all about her after all. Are we as a society so desperate to build up our children's self-esteem that we clad them so? How pathetic.

I want my kids to know that helping others, listening to others and thinking about others can be more rewarding than being helped, listened to, or thought of. My daughter is at the age where she should start being less selfish and think outside herself more and more. Giving her a shirt that encourages the opposite is deplorable.

It's going to be an uphill battle; me against society and the media. Last week I went to Corvallis and watched my beloved Beavers lose in OT to FCS Sac State. When I told my daughter that the Beavers lost she asked me if they got a trophy.

Sigh.