Waiting For My Fifteen Minutes

I check my blog stats a couple of times a day. I don’t know why I do this, since I know how many people I have told that I am doing a blog, and the number of hits generally reflects that. I do have days when I get a larger number of hits, mostly due to some really odd searches. I think that is my favorite part of checking the stats, seeing what was typed into a search engine to stumble upon my little corner of bitterness. It would appear that when I picked the name for this silly thing, I stumbled upon a way to average three times the daily hits than I have friends. You put ecstasy in the title, you get a few hits from the ol’ search engine for “how old can you be and still take ecstasy” and “make your own ecstasy.”

I think I may be too old to get all the hip things that the kids are blogging about these days. I could post that I have PICTURES OF BRITTANY SPEARS NAKED or LINDSEY LOHAN CROTCH SHOT or perhaps CLICK HERE FOR PARIS HILTON SEX TAPE, but I think those topics may be outdated. I don’t know who we are supposed to be waiting for sex tapes from anymore. I used to know, but that was when I was young and carefree and could have made my own sex tape that wouldn’t be used to assist in stomach evacuation therapy. Maybe if I talked about a JESSICA ALBA NUDE PHOTO SHOOT. Isn’t she supposed to be the cats pajamas these days?

Judging by the most popular blogs right now, I should be talking more about POLITICS  to get my hits up. Talking about how GEORGE BUSH EATS LIVE BABY BUNNY RABBITS and HILLARY CLINTON CAUGHT IN LESBIAN ORGY WITH MONICA LEWISNKY. But I don’t really care enough about politics to write an intelligent blog about it. I tend to go with the person who thinks like I do, or says that they do, and stick with them. Since there is a media darling right now, I could talk about the fact that OBAMA PROMISES NIGHT OF PASSION IN LINCOLN BEDROOM WITH EVERY WOMAN WHO VOTES FOR HIM. Alas, talking politics will get me a lot of comments, but probably not ones that I want to look at.

I know! Movies! I can talk about movies! But I don’t go see movies anymore, so I could only review the ones that have come out on DVD, and that would be silly. I could review the direct to DVD movies, but if you buy those, are you really looking for the quality OSCAR WINNING FILM that would be encoded upon said plastic disc?

I could talk about my favorite LOLCATS on ICANHASCHEEZBURGER, but everyone already knows about that, and they saw them there. I could point out that there is a dog version of the same site called IHASAHOTDOG but its pretty well known too.

So, after long introspection and reflection, I have decided to continue with my blogger ethics and not use cheap tricks trying to increase my hit count, like placing a huge amount of keywords in my blog in bold all-caps. That would just violate my integrity.

All My Vacation Belong To Family

I got my real and true career start when I moved to Tucson, Arizona. I was making good money, getting vacation time, and doing what I had trained to do. There was only one big problem. My first wife and I were from a town 1000 miles away. So all of my vacation time was used up going to visit family for holidays. After the divorce, all of my vacation was used to go see the kids since they lived with their mother, back in the hometown. After Arizona and a spot in Houston, I didn’t really have a job that lasted long enough to build vacation time. Now, I have the time, I have the money, and I am making a list of the things I want to do on vacation in my life.

1. Climb the Grand Teton.
I have wanted to do this for almost my entire life. I realize, of course, that there will be a lot of hard work associated with this dream, as in the shape I am currently in, it would be next to impossible. Most people know that Weebles roll downhill easier than they climb.

2. Visit a foreign country
Unless I get serious about learning another language, I am going to have to limit myself to the English speaking ones. Luckily, I want to go to a lot of those places. Scotland would be awesome. I would spend most of my time in bars trying to follow drunken conversations with that thick accent.

3. See every National Park in the U.S.
I have been to a great many already. I have been to Yellowstone so many times that I spend my time there watching the people instead of the sights. It always makes me laugh to see people freaking out over elk. I cannot even begin to count the number of times that I have opened the curtains at the ranch  to see elk in the front yard. I even saw a car with California plates outside of Yellowstone stopped to take pictures of cows. To me, that is funny.

4. Go on a cruise
This one I would like to do just to say that I did it. I honestly don’t know how much fun I would have, but too many people I know have gone on a cruise, so I want to. Childish, huh?

5. Stay home without a damn thing to do
No housework, no projects, nothing. Just the chance to sit around, stay up all night, get drunk, sleep in, whatever. Just a week of no responsibility.

6. The same as number 5
Except on a boat.

7. Inter-coastal Waterway
On my own boat, a nice, decent sized cruiser, leave Galveston and travel along the coast all the way to Key West. This is probably one of those Lottery dreams.

After careful evaluation of the above items, I have decided what I am going to do for my vacation this year. I will be going home to see my middle son graduate high school. Responsibility trumps dreams most of the time. As long as you are responsible.

The Ecstasy and Agony of Planning

Although I wrote about all the difficulties surrounding making a comprehensive plan last time, I noted something yesterday. When you finally figure out the path, it feels like a weight has been lifted. You start to get excited about things and make the contingency plans. While I was driving, I felt oddly happy. I was almost in a good mood. This hadn’t happened in so long that it took me a while to recognize it. As I pondered the odd mood, I tried to figure out why I was in a good mood. I realized that I had made a mental step. I had moved from the “what if I?” to the “When will I?” stage. My mind had been made up, it was only a matter of time.

I talk a lot in analogies. It makes it easier to get my point across. I think the best analogy I can come up with for this situation is the “Vacation Planning” scenario. The first thing you have to decide is where to go on vacation. There are so many options! Paris, Rio, Grand Canyon? Where should I go on vacation? This is where it becomes necessary to separate the fantasy from the reality. Yeah, there is a plethora of destinations, but you can only afford a select few. So, you set aside the pamphlets for the places you cant afford to get to, intending to keep them for a later vacation. Now your decision is which of the remaining places to go to.

So far, this is easy. You mesh together the reality and the fantasy and find a compromise between the two. This is where I start to have difficulties. I really don’t like any of the places that I can afford, my eyes keep wandering to the stack of the “out of reach” pamphlets. A long time ago, a girl I knew did her best to teach me “not to settle.” By that she meant to accept less than what you want/need, and if you have to work harder to get it, do so. But don’t get something that will do in order to get it now. So now I am looking at the expensive pamphlets, knowing that is what I really want, but also knowing that the time isn’t right. I know that I can get the vacation I truly want, just not right now. So I make the decision to wait. I could buy the plane tickets to Dublin, but I couldn’t afford a hotel. So I set the vacation aside until I can do it right.

Translate this over into any other situation. The destination is one decision, the big one. Once you figure out what you want, you can start getting the details ironed out. The destination isn’t enough, you have to know what it is you want to do when you get there. You have to plan your limited time. If you find that you don’t have enough time to do everything you want to, you have to wait and build up your vacation time so you can take more time off and do those things.

Before too long, you have a long list of things that you need to do in order to reach your goal. They have been carefully thought out, the prerequisites established, and a realistic time frame set. This is the part where I start to get excited. I can see the reality of the situation. I can see the goal, I can see the path. I have the means and the desire. I have the drive.

I was thinking all of this on the way home last night. Then I got home and a couple of things happened that blew the good mood away. But the goal is still there, the plan is still in place. I just might have to adjust a few of the details along the way.

The Problem With Planning

Most self help books, including the ones about succeeding in business without really trying, agree that the key to success lies in the creation and accomplishment of goals. Specifically, long term goals. The problem with long term goals is that they take a long time to finish. This is a problem for impatient souls like me. I see the goal, I see the path I need to take too achieve said goal, but I realize that it there are a lot of variables.  Variables that I have no control over. In the course of my career, I have made many plans in order to get a particular task accomplished. In those instances, I was in control. I had a team or teams of people under my direction, and I was able to direct the ebb and flow of events towards the final destination.

It worked well with the way I think. Do this, then this, then this, success. Each step had a particular length of time associated with its completion, carefully calculated based on highly technical estimates and trial runs. You don’t get any trial runs with life. You can’t set a particular timetable if others are involved. Especially if they aren’t even aware of the plan. You have to anticipate, you have to make educated guesses that can be completely wrong. Like chess. You could go into the game with the whole thing laid out end to end in your mind, I move this piece here, which will make my opponent do that, step by step, checkmate.

Then they move the knight first instead of the pawn, and the game is all ad libbed. You wind up in a frantic race, reacting instead of being proactive, second guessing yourself and wondering if this hassle was even worth playing the game in the first place. I cannot help but try to see ahead of the move.  I have a tendency to try to reverse engineer social situations, work my way backwards from the desired result to see the best path. Unfortunately, I also think in a fairly linear pattern, having to follow each potential path to its conclusion before abandoning it. Well, a decision tree is called a tree because of all the possible branches, and that holds true for me with the reverse engineering. So what happens is that I get so many potential branches on my way back to a starting point that I don’t know how to start. I know where I want to go, but out of the multitude of optional starting points, I cant decide which is the best.

Sometimes, I can figure it all out. I know how to start, the path to take and how its all going to work out to get me to my goal. But step one is to wait. There are a few things that need to happen before I can start walking down the road, and I have no control over those things. And to add to the uncertainty and fear, there is the potential that one of the variables could change drastically while I am waiting for the step one trigger event. So then the question becomes, should I trigger it now? And if I do, how will that impact the path, the timetable and possibly the outcome?

The other big problem I have is that no matter how badly I want to win the race, I refuse to violently shove people out of the way to get to the finish line before them.

Man, I mixed a hell of a lot of metaphors in this one, I hope my readership, which occasionally stretches into the double digits, can forgive me in this instance. My mind is in a whirl.

Fond Memories

I first got my experience with boating when I was very young. My Dad’s stepbrother had a boat, and would occasionally invite us to Palisades Reservoir in Idaho, and the extended family would camp and try to to water ski. That doesnt count. The boating I am talking about started when I was about 26 or 27.

My buddy M had a boat. He was roommates with S, whom I dubbed Mag. M was one of those unique guys that isnt all that good looking, but there was something about him that the women liked. He was never lonely. Mag, he was good looking. He always had the ladies fawning over him. The reason I called him Mag is because he was a chick magnet. We started going to Apache Lake in Arizona about once a month.

Apache Lake is beautiful, but remote. But there was always a crowd there. Our typical weekend would consist of driving up after work on Friday, getting the boat in the water and pitching the tents (in my case, folding down the seats of the Party Wagon) and sitting around a campfire drinking and telling jokes and laughing. In the morning, we would wake up and take the boat to a restaurant on the lake and have breakfast and Bloody Mary’s. Then we would go do a little knee boarding, then drop anchor in Party Cove. This is the story of my favorite memory, but pretty much any story I told of those weekend trips would sound the same, with only the details changing.

We had dropped anchor in Party Cove. There was me,  my  best friend J and the roomies M and Mag. We laughed and drank a while, taking in the scenery and watching the dumb kids jump off the rocks. I noticed a boat not too far away. “J,” I said, “the math is wrong on that boat.” He looked in the direction I indicated for a minute, then asked what was wrong with it. “The ratio is all wrong. There are three guys and seven women. It’s top heavy, and I have an obligation to fix it. Mag, get a fresh beer, I’m goin fishin.”

I had decided on this course of action after careful observation the last time we were in Party Cove. I got the ski rope and attached it firmly to the tube we played around on, and Mag, fresh beer in hand, hopped on. I gave the tube a shove towards the dangerously top heavy boat. Mag slowly paddled around, eventually making his way close. I watched with satisfaction as as the bikini clad overstock noted his progress. Mag reached his rope limit, lay his head back and relaxed. Soon, two more tubes were in the water, launched from the SS Top Heavy. A splashing fight ensued amongst the coeds, eventually hitting Mag. The pieces were all in place. The girls apologized, coming over to talk to Mag. There were three of them, two had been sharing a tube. They talked, they giggled, and I slowly pulled the rope in. The mass of floating flesh and float tube got closer to us and farther from their point of origin. At the point where it was farther to go back to the SS Top Heavy than it was to go to our boat, Mag sealed the deal. He drained the last of his beer and called to me to pull him in so he could get another. The girls followed, beers were offered all around and the SS Top Heavy was saved from certain doom. We had nobly, selflessly taken on their excess weight.

I think M wound up dating one them for quite a while. We all were friends and kept in touch. When the boat wasn’t available, J and I would give two of our catch a call, and we would stay at their place on the weekend to float the Salt River. But that is a story for another time.