Tag: life

One Man Stands Alone

~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

Traffic circles, or roundabouts as we call them around here, seem to be popping up everywhere in rural North Carolina. It’s like the NC DOT ran out of stoplights and stop signs, so they’ve just decided to build some circles for drivers to navigate at their own leisure. Last week, I may have set the record for most consecutive circumnavigations of a single circle. Ambush would be too strong a word, but I was definitely surprised to find a brand new traffic circle out in the the middle of nowhere, and once it in, I had to go around three or four times to make heads or tales out of the signage, which became more difficult with each subsequent pass because I started to become a little dizzy. 

Thankfully, no one else was around or going around while I was circling, so I was just a lone man driving in circles, trying to find my way in this brave new world of self-serve traffic patterns, self-serve everything. 

When Thomas fractured his arm last year, I got stuck in self-serve purgatory. I needed to get a copy of all his bills for my insurance, but his doctor’s office here no longer deals with billing, and so they gave me the number for the regional billing office. I called them and they told me I could access all his records in the client self-serve portal. Only, I couldn’t. I had already tried on my computer and on my phone and on my wife’s computer, but my entry into the portal was barred for reasons beyond anybody’s understanding–the IT department couldn’t figure it out, the billing department couldn’t figure it out. They kept ping-ponging me back and forth.  

So I went back to Thomas’s doctor’s office, prepared to begin a hunger strike if they didn’t give me a copy of his records. Do you know who figured it out? The pleasant receptionist at the front desk. Somebody in billing had entered my birthday wrong. That’s why I couldn’t get into the portal. Still, she didn’t have the power to fix it. Eventually, her boss came over and, upon hearing my tale of woe, took pity on me and broke protocol. I had literally spent hours on the phone attempting to resolve this problem, mostly on hold trying not to spontaneously combust. She printed out my bills in less than a minute. 

As a nation, we need to repent of this stupidity. Yesterday, I was in Lowe’s and was sad to see that the hostile takeover by self-serve registers was nearly complete. I am glad my wife’s Poppaw didn’t live long enough to see this current state of affairs. He used to be on a first name basis with all the cashiers at Lowes. Now, not a single old school register, manned by a cashier, remained in the main checkout area. I suppose the Lowes CEO thought their reputation for customer service couldn’t get any worse and just decided to get rid of customer service altogether. He should be wearing sackcloth. 

At the risk of sounding like I’m turning into an old curmudgeon, I’ll admit I may feel a little lost in our brave new self-serve society. At the rate society is progressing, soon the only person I’ll have left to blame is myself, and where’s the fun in that? 

The Hunt for Color-Coded October

~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Once in a blue moon, I’ll actually grow hopeful that my wife has finally shaken free from the shackles of her obsession. But her newfound freedom never lasts. Secretly, she’ll start planning meals for the week, color coding and syncing calendars, and getting a little twitchy whenever I suggest that we just enjoy life and go with the flow. Before long, she will once again be Captain Ahab at the helm, hunting for the illusive white whale or, in her case, the illusive routine. 

photo of planner and writing materials

“If only we could get a routine,” I’ve heard her say a thousand times. 

From stories I’ve heard of old, routines did once exist. Now, most grizzled millennial parents seem to believe that routines, if not already extinct, are on the verge of extinction in our modern era. Ours is an era of endless options, when stores never close, when youth sports have no offseason, when work (through conduit of the internet) sneaks into our homes and intrudes on domestic downtime, when everything (through the conduit of the internet) vies for our attention, our time, and mostly our money. When no boundaries exist to protect our space or contain our movements, it’s no wonder that we’re “all running around,” my wife says, “like free-range chickens with our heads cut off.” She has never been a fan of free-range living. 

Admittedly, she is the chief fence builder for our lives. I have always hated building fences, both literally and figuratively, and generally recoil from the task, much like a spinning jenny recoils when I accidentally let a high tensile wire slip and spring back to form a bird’s nest tangle fit for a pterodactyl. My wife, however, has some natural aptitude toward figurative fence building, for planning and organizing and scheduling (yuck, I recoil at even typing the word). To build a routine, you have to do the same thing, at the same time, in the same order, day after day, which sounds really boring to me and really wonderful to her. 

To achieve such a boring pattern, you use things like alarms, calendars, and planners–all tools of the devil. Do you think Adam and Eve set an alarm clock in the Garden of Eden? Do you think Thoreau scheduled out his days on the banks of Walden Pond? Do you think Jimmy Buffett color coded his calendar in Margaritaville? No, he didn’t even color code his wardrobe. He just picked a parrot shirt and went to the bar.

The point here is my wife has a problem, namely her obsession to stamp out disorder in a disorderly world. Please put her on your prayer list.

Learning and Relearning

~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

Thomas is a fun-loving ball of energy. If something fun is going on, Thomas wants to be in the middle of it–no hesitation, no apprehension, no fear. Some folks wade into a pool–Thomas runs, jumps, and yells “cannon ball.” The only problem is he can’t swim. Which is a pretty big problem for a child with no fear around water. 

But he is getting close. Last week, we took him to the pool at our local YMCA, where he has done swimming lessons each year for the last three years–and this time he actually made good forward progress, kicking his legs and doggy-paddling. I suspect it won’t be long until he basically turns into a fish. This year, he was the smallest child in his group at swim lessons, but the biggest dare devil by far. 

Lifeguard: Who wants to jump off the side?

Thomas: [hands shoots up first] Me! Me! Me!

Lifeguard: Who wants to go down the slide?

Thomas: [hand shoots up first] I do! I do! I do!

Despite being only five, Thomas has gotten a lot of exposure to water, mostly because I have to travel frequently for my day job, which is unfortunate because I hate hotels. The problem is I can never sleep well in hotels because I’m always afraid of oversleeping. I’m not sure why this bothers me because I always oversleep my alarm when I’m at home, where I’m a fourth or fifth snooze type of person. But with hotels, I basically associate them with the fear of oversleeping, missing my presentation, losing my job, and becoming destitute and homeless. 

Thomas, however, associates hotels with swimming pools. He loves hotels. Or mostly he just loves Fairfield Inns because that is the hotel I nearly always stay at–I’m a creature of habit. Most Fairfield Inns have the exact same floor plan, and down the hall from the lobby is a small indoor pool. Despite being an indoor pool, the water feels like it has just been piped in from the arctic, so it takes a few minutes to wade in and get acclimated, at least for me. For Thomas: ”Cannon ball!” 

Sometimes I wonder where his fearless instinct comes from. But deep down in the crevices of my brain, I think I can conjure up memories of a time when I used to be the same way, when I used to be a cannonball, dive-right-in type of child instead of dip-my-toe-and-wade-in type of adult. I don’t know what happens as we get older; it seems like we learn to hesitate, worry, and fear, and fear is a strange thing. It’s good for staying alive but not necessarily for living. 

Maybe I can learn a thing or two from Thomas. Maybe I can learn to reassociate things with fun instead of fear–or at least I could reassociate hotels with something more pleasant than destitution, maybe something like free bacon at the continental breakfast. 

white metal railings near swimming pool

Observations of the Unobservant

~ sanebishop ~ 9 Comments

My wife has observed that I am “unobservant,” which is a strange thing to call a man who correctly identified a picture hanging in a different spot by the second guess. Plus, my first guess was partly right–she had painted the room a new variation of beige, just two years ago and I had just now noticed. 

Apparently, I am not the only person who is unobservant. Our house sits on the side of a fork in the road. Every day, every hour, every ten minutes somebody heading upstream on the second prong fails to observe the stop sign. They crane their necks to see if anybody is coming up the primary prong, and if not, they just blow right through the stop sign. If I ever discover some priceless treasure in all my farm junk that I want to keep hidden and secure–let’s say, for instance, a Picasso painting–I would hang it on the stop sign. Sure, my wife would notice if it was hanging a little crooked, but certainly no one else would stop to steal Pablo’s work. 

“The right side is just a hair too low,” I could imagine my wife saying. 

“Nope, that is just Picasso–he liked cockeyed shoulders,” I’d reply, but it would do no good because soon she would have me retrieving the level. 

The problem is my wife observes things in the actual world, whereas I mostly just observe things in my head–and there is a lot going on in my head. In one corner, people are conversing over matters of great importance, and one of those people looks and sounds a lot like me–except my head’s version is extremely witty, articulate, and persuasive. Then in another corner of my head, all the things I need to accomplish are swirling around like a little whirlwind, battering the inside of my noggin with logistical details. In the top of my head, larger storm clouds are gathering and thunder is rumbling. With each flash of lightning on my mental horizon, I’m counting the seconds to predict how far away the costs of major life purchases are, such as the cost of replacing our cars or our twenty-year-old heating and air unit. 

In the back of my head are the stables where I keep my high horses. High horses need a lot of tending because I ride them into battle every ten minutes to vanquish all the people in my head who disagree with me. Occasionally, amidst all the vanquishing, funny thoughts pop up in my head, and, like a hound dog, I must follow those thoughts until I find the punchline or someone, usually my wife, punches me in the arm and tells me to pay attention. 

“You need to pay more attention,” she says. 

“I am paying attention, thank you very much,” I reply. “I’m paying attention to the three-ring-circus in my head, and currently the ring master is being chased by a hound dog riding a high horse in a whirlwind. It is pretty hard to pay attention when I’m the ring master.” 

I should probably spend more time learning from my four-year-old son. Thomas is the most observant person I’ve ever met, even more so than my wife. Every two seconds he is observing something in the actual world. I know this because every two seconds he is providing fresh commentary on his observations.

“There is a chair!”

“That’s great!” I say.

“There is a spider web in the corner of the room.” 

“That’s great!” I say. 

“You’ve got a hair in your nose.”

“Thomas, focus!” I say. “We’re trying to put on your socks!” 

Apparently, four-year-olds pay too much attention and forty-year-olds can’t pay enough. I’m not sure what happens between four and forty, but I’m pretty sure he observes more in sixty seconds than I do all day.