Posted on December 22, 2024
On Christmas (2024)
‘Tis the season, as it were. A time of joy and hope, prayer and merriment. The Christmas season is one many of us cherish, and for good reasons. But as I sat down to consider what it means to me, I realized that answer isn’t easy to pin down.
I have an early Christmas memory that while perhaps not my earliest chronologically, feels like my earliest spiritually. My family and I spent the holiday at my grandpa’s ranch, and that gave us a unique opportunity. On a day with a quiet dusting of snowflakes coming down from a gray sky, we rode out on ATVs into the woods behind his house and found a Christmas tree.
We cut it down and brought it back, snow on its branches and the scent of pine heavy in the air—a scent I still adore to this day. Christmas, then, meant a sense of adventure with those that I love.
Fast forward, and we enter the period I’m least proud of. Some kids may go their entire lives focusing on what’s truly important during Christmas, but I was not one of them. It became all about the presents, and I cringe at some of my brattier moments.
One that stands out was how I once threw a fit when I received a package of socks, something that had been—and continues to be—something of a family tradition. I stomped off in a huff, mortally offended that my parents would dare give me such a thing. Christmas, then, meant taking.
Luckily, this phase ended as I matured. Christmases started to happen at my aunt’s house, and all of the family on that side would gather together for a day of kith and kin. Some of my best memories with my extended family come from these get togethers, generally the only time all year we would see each other. Christmas, then, meant catching up with family I rarely saw.
My high school time and *ahem* gap year ended, seeing me off to college several states away. This proved a tumultuous time for my family and myself, both for the normal reasons and for some unexpected ones. But one of the constants I had was getting to travel home for the holidays each of the four years I was gone.
These visits taught me important lessons about what it means to maintain family relationships and how they take effort. When you see your family members every day, you can’t help but expect them to be there. When you live hundreds of miles apart, that assurance doesn’t seem so sure anymore. Christmas, then, meant appreciating the bonds of immediate family.
Soon after graduation, I found myself stationed in Guam. For those unfamiliar, it is an island in roughly the middle of nowhere on the other side of the world from the United States. Ticket costs prevented me from coming home, and I spent my first Christmas apart from family.
What stands out the most from this phase was the lack of pine scent. I didn’t see the need to buy a tree just for myself, and I didn’t bother with any decorations. My apartment looked much the same as it always did, spartan and functional. What I saved in money, I lost in other ways. Christmas, then, meant being alone.
The next year, however, my life had a major change. Instead of being single, I was in a committed relationship with the woman who would become my wife. Much like the food critic from the movie Ratatouille, she does not likeChristmas—she loves it. Her enthusiasm rubbed off on me, and the next few years saw her excitement for the season seep into my life. We hung stockings, developed our own Christmas traditions, and fought to see who could get the other the best gag gift.
The scent of pine came back into my holiday season.
Christmas, then, meant being with the woman I love during the time of year she enjoys most.
Then, another major change—we had a son. No longer did the Christmas season revolve around her and me, now it was her, me, and him. And while we certainly get joy out of the season, I find that I get more now from watching his joy blossom more each year.
Our son carries such a sense of wonder within him during this time, I can’t help but be drawn in by it. He points excitedly out the window every night when our neighbor’s decorations turn on. He loves to read Christmas books, coming up with his own stories as he flips through pages to look at the pictures. He stared with rapt attention at a church nativity play, drawn to the baby at the center of both the play and Christmas itself.
Soon, we will be joined by a daughter, rounding out our family to an even four. What will she find in the Christmas season? Joy and peace, I hope. A focus on Christ and charity, I pray. Regardless, I know that it will be all four of us together. Christmas, now, means sharing in the season together with those I am closest to in this world and seeing the wonder in their eyes.
Christmas, then, isn’t one thing to everyone. It isn’t even one thing to each of us individually. The meaning changes with the years and our circumstances, and we can only guess what those will be in the future. But we each have a say in our approach to the season, and I appreciate what that offers us.
Merry Christmas to all. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
Posted on December 8, 2024
Twinkle Trials: My Journey to Holiday Illumination
“When are you going to put up the Christmas lights?” my wife asked.
I looked at her much like how a cow looks at an oncoming train. In the eight years of our marriage, I had yet to undertake this husbandly right of passage. I had a legion of excuses over those years, of course. We live in an apartment! German 220v power outlets will explode! What even is South Korea!
Now, however, we live in a place so violently suburbia I can’t walk out my front door without getting slapped by an HOA violation. As we approached the holiday season, more and more of the houses surrounding us put up their own lights. Each incandescent bulb accused me with their twinkling, illuminating my cowardice.
“Most of the people around us have theirs up,” my wife continued. I writhed in my seat, trying like a young school child to avoid eye contact so the teacher would pass me by even though she had already called on me.
Then my wife pulled out the big guns. She sighed. “I guess it’s not that big a deal if you don’t. I’ve basically given up hope on ever having Christmas lights up anyways.”
A double-barrel sawed-off shotgun blast of guilt. I never stood a chance.
Several days later, I had three boxes of lights, a hundred plastic clips, a ladder, and an extension cord. I stood ready for battle, and threw open our front door to make my wife proud.
“Please don’t hurt yourself,” she said as I stepped outside.
I looked over my shoulder at her. “I will return with my shield or on it.”
She gave me the customary eye roll that I choose to interpret as deep affection, and battle was joined.
My first salvo went well. I felt the excitement of balancing a fully extended ladder on only three solid touch points, the thrill of pushing said unbalanced ladder off a rain gutter to slide a light string behind it. A whisper in the back of my mind mentioned behavior like this likely spurs most Christmas movies to paint the husband as an idiot, but it’s easy to ignore such quibbles while making progress.
I finished the first string and stood on the ground to admire my handywork. It had gone far better than anticipated, and my morale soared. I snapped a finger and thought I should plug it in to verify everything worked right. That’s when I realized I had put the lights on the wrong way, leaving me with no way to plug the lights into the extension cord.
I briefly debated leaving the lights up and telling my wife we bought a new hyper-energy efficient bulb that doesn’t light up very well, but demurred when I realized that would only result in another Home Depot trip. Up the ladder I went, clawing against the plastic clips that stubbornly clung to the lights they had so recently fought against holding.
Having taken far too long completing the easiest part of my exterior illumination project, I now turned to the most dangerous: the peak. Our house has a barn-like aesthetic, with a sharp peak jutting upward like the Himalayas. This is problematic for two reasons. First, my ladder can’t go high enough to reach the tip, and second, the peak has a large tree blocking a ladder from reaching the area anyways.
I stood with my hands on my hips and engaged in the age-old practice of men everywhere—frowning at the problem and hoping it would resolve itself. The peak looked down on me and scoffed.
Undeterred, I decided if I couldn’t come from below, I’d have to go over. Sure, the roof angles down so steep that even the most experienced long hall trucker would think twice before taking his rig down a grade like that. And yes, only most of the ice from a previous snowfall had fully melted. But I had a wife to impress and boots with moderately good tread on them. Up the ladder I went.
I took one step onto the roof, and immediately realized I would be disappointing my wife. My foot slid backwards as soon as I put pressure on it, and only a quick scramble served by years of athletic endeavors prevented me from a holiday trip to the emergency room.
My wife, of course, was devastated. I could see the question behind her eyes as I explained the situation, wondering how she wound up with a husband who couldn’t properly decorate a home for the holidays.
“What if I just skipped the peak and strung the lights from one side to the other in a straight line?” I asked.
I might as well have asked if she wanted me to toss a bucket of fish heads across the front of our house. Horror mingled with disgust as she tried to keep her facial expression under control.
“That…could work,” she ground out, every word like a fingernail getting pried out with a pair of rusty pliers.
As I mentioned before, our marriage is eight years strong. Subtle though her displeasure was, I somehow managed to pick up on it. “So that’s a no, then,” I said.
“Well, what else can you do at this point?” she asked.
I cast about frantically for a solution. Jet pack? Too unpredictable. Trained birds? Too much poop. Paying someone else to do it? Too much pride.
Then my eyes fell on the tree blocking easy access with the ladder, and the voice of Marcus Aurelius echoed in my head—the obstacle is the way.
“What if I run the lights around the tree and along the ground before coming up on the other side of the peak?” I said, not daring to let the desperation in my voice come out.
She paused a beat, and I sensed the moment pass where she had been prepared to reject whatever I said. “I think that will work,” she said, her voice hesitant with just a touch of hope.
So I got to it, making quick work of my impromptu lighting solution. The tree fought me, and the plastic clips drew blood as I finished the rest of the run, but at the end, I stood triumphant.
Is this house perfect? No. Is my wife convinced she married the most competent of men? Probably not. Are the little lights twinkling? No, and thanks for noticing.
But for the first time in my adult life, my home can bring a little bit of joy to those who pass by during this Christmas season. And if that isn’t a reason to be merry, I don’t know what is.
Posted on November 25, 2024
Big Talk, No Walk: How to Avoid Leadership Theater
Recently, I got to be Putin, Xi Jinping, Ayatollah Khamenei, and Kim Jung Un in the space of about forty minutes. Needless to say, the power went to my head immediately.
I sat as a panel member giving feedback to students developing national defense strategies for some of our besties like Russia and North Korea. This is right up my alley—the class covers doctrine from adversary nations, and learning to think from their perspective is a crucial part of it. The panel entertained both because I got to put myself in those authoritarian boots and because the students were so willing to argue back with me on why their plan was, in fact, the best one to destroy America.
Team USA, however, disappointed me the most. Even though the given scenario involved significant gains from our adversaries, they advocated for maintaining the status quo through what they called decisive actions, which translated to actions either too vague or inconsequential to actually matter. And yet, I don’t blame them for this. I blame today’s foremost style of leadership: big talk, no walk.
First, a caveat. Obviously, no one leadership style encompasses every leader, or even every moment of a single leader’s day. Also, I am by no means immune to this style myself. So take this with a large grain of salt from one who knows he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. This is an opinion piece, and like going to the DMV, you just have to endure it.
Big talk, no walk style leadership involves, as one might guess, lots of words with little action to back them up. This breaks out into three areas. First, a reliance on vague buzzword salads instead of concrete goals or actions. Second, overpromising results with zero likelihood of success. And third, an abject failure to embrace humility.
Let’s start with the first area, vague buzzword salads. This occurs as a leader say nothing of importance even after vomiting words out their mouth for an entire meeting. The concept unperins Weird Al’s song “Mission Statement” and makes it entertaining. Take the first few lines:
We must all efficiently operationalize our strategies,
Invest in world-class technology and leverage our core competencies,
In order to holistically administrate exceptional synergy.
Try to gain a single useful bit of guidance out of that. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You can’t, because it carries no substance. Yet I’d bet anyone who has worked in a large organization has heard those same terms ad nauseum. We watch leadership theater as our leaders mouthing words that sound right but fall apart at the most cursory of glances.
More distressingly, this concept also defines what Bruce Stubbs talks about in his article on the failures of recent heads of the US Navy. He argues that the past few Chief’s of Naval Operations have relied far more on vague generalities than concrete guidance, which Stubbs claims sits at the root of many of the Navy’s current woes. One cannot follow a leader’s vision if that vision is little more than a mirage.
The second area is likely as old as humanity. So long as we’ve been talking with each other, I’m certain people have overpromised knowing they can never deliver. Today, however, followers rarely hold their leaders to account for it. Politicians tend to have the most bombastic examples, as campaign trail promises vanish soon after the polls close. Yet these objectively provable fallacies rarely blows back on them, particularly here in the United States where voters often care more about the letter after a candidate’s name than any of their policy positions.
This concept also impacts every other sector in which leadership is a thing. So, you know, all of life. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Theranos CEO bilking investors out of millions with false claims about blood test technology, televangelists claiming that if people mail them money, they’ll be healed, and every restaurant review on Google Maps.
Again, this is not new. But what concerns me is how little consequence there seems to be for it these days. It has become the norm to overpromise things and have no need to follow-up, which leaves those following a leader with little hope of knowing what to expect.
Finally, there is humility. As I’ve touched on before, humility is important. It is the fundamental trait to all effective leadership, because without humility you cannot learn from your own mistakes. It’s also critical to recognizing when the situation is too complicated for a simple solution, or to acknowledge when a leader is out of their depth.
It’s a cliché at this point to say when everything is a priority, nothing is, yet that’s how leaders continue to operate. Rare is the organization that can define a priorities list and actually stick to it. Even more rare, the leader who puts their credibility on the line by saying no, we can’t do that.
Where does humility factor into that? Recognizing that you can’t do everything. We live in a resource constrained world—time, money, resources, and people are finite. Even a country as powerful as the United States can’t be everywhere at once, but it sure seems like we’ll keep trying.
Vague buzzword salad, overpromising, and a lack of humility. Big talk, no walk. That’s what I saw when these students briefed how America would handle their scenario crisis, and that’s why they’re doomed to fail when their little tabletop exercise kicks off. Maybe one day we can turn things around and start with a big walk defined by as little talk as possible. That’s the leader I hope to be one day.
Posted on November 10, 2024
The Caca Campaign: A Potty Training War Journal
Potty training. Two words that stoke the fear of parents more than any others. And yet, it is inevitable. Thus were the thoughts of my wife and I as we entered this most trying of times.
Where others dread, however, we prepared. Both of us have experience with operational planning, and we leveraged that to the maximum extent. We studied the art of potty training and our adversary. We read books by experts and learned the shape of the campaign to come. Most importantly, we fortified ourselves both mentally and spiritually.
The night before we began our campaign, we looked at each other. I saw fear in my wife’s eyes, but also hope. Courage, even. We have fought in wars and led others through adversity. This might be hard, but it was doable.
What fools we were.
Day 1
Our plan called for a four-day campaign. I spent the majority of day one at work, receiving updates via text as the battle commenced. The initial phase called for scorched earth tactics—have the toddler get rid of his diapers, then run around sans pants to let him know he ain’t in Kansas anymore.
He approached the situation warily, like a tiger smelling something on the wind that bodes ill. My wife texted with confidence that the situation was well in hand. Then, radio silence.
My dread grew as time passed with no update. Had the adversary counterattacked? Was the plan still in effect? I could do nothing but wait and hope.
Finally, a message arrived: “He had an accident, had to clean it up.” The battle took its first casualty, but there would be more to come.
Several hours later, I returned home to the battlefield. The first thing I saw was my half-naked toddler running to the door to greet me, joy on his face. The second thing I saw was my wife, though I barely recognized her. I had left a green recruit that morning, eager for combat and the promise of glory. I returned home to a grizzled veteran, one who has seen the other side and knows glory for the false idol that it is.
I quickly hopped into the fight, eyes locked onto my son for any twitch or dribble that might signal an oncoming firefight. Despite our best efforts, he had a second accident. But hope remained, because we finished out the remainder of the evening with only those two incidents. We could do this, we though to ourselves. We had the initiative.
But the power of the toddler could not be denied.
Day 2
The second day started with rage. From the moment we opened his bedroom door, our toddler ensured we knew his intense displeasure with the situation. Tears were shed as the battle began, and what hopes we had gained the previous day evaporated under the onslaught.
Accident after accident assailed us, the blows raining down on us in unending sequence. Time stretched, the minutes passing like hours. We debated giving up, either by going back to diapers or pouring kitty litter all over the house.
But then, the tide shifted once again. Somehow, we convinced our child to sit on his little toilet, and he unleashed two days of pent of poop in a single blow. Simultaneously, his attitude shifted remarkably for the positive. I am no biologist, but the timing makes the two events seem linked.
This was our D-Day moment. We had taken the beach, and the adversary was in full retreat. All we had to do now was press home our advantage, and victory would be ours.
Day 3
Momentum is funny thing. When you have it, it seems inevitable that it will continue. Small hiccups along the way are waved away, even as their friction slows your progress. Then you look up and find yourself stationary, with only a brief moment of denial flaring as momentum turns against you.
Day two may have ended with the Allies taking the beaches of Normandy, but day three consisted of trench warfare on the Somme. Massive casualties were sustained on both sides for minor gains, soon to be wiped out from adversary’s the next salvo. Shell shock and thousand-yard stares became the norm as both sides settled in for a protracted conflict.
What our child did not know is that we had reinforcements coming. An aunt and uncle were coming to dinner that evening, and we prayed they would be enough to break the stalemate. They did. Unfortunately, it broke in our toddler’s favor.
Where we hoped that his excitement at seeing them would translate into a desire to impress them with his newfound potty skills, our toddler took a different path. He chose to demonstrate his excitement by peeing all over himself multiple times, smiling and laughing as he did. The sound haunts me still.
I don’t know if the aunt and uncle will ever come back.
Day 4
While the first day’s battle was my wife’s to fight, the last day’s would be mine. She kissed me as she left the battlefield for work, and I felt in it that she worried it would be our last. I swore then and there that I would do whatever it took to get back to her.
My toddler and I locked eyes, and battle was joined.
What I soon realized is that his attempted breakout the night before was his Battle of the Bulge: a list ditch effort meant to break through our resolve, but one that could not be followed up on if it failed. His will met ours, and found itself wanting.
Time after time, my son told me that he needed to potty and went cooperatively to his toilet. No accidents occurred, no meltdowns, no moments of panic or drippage. It was as if he had surrendered completely, a post-WW2 Germany more inclined towards making amends than taking revenge. Victory, it seemed, was ours.
My wife came home in shock. We had endured the trial and the flame and emerged. Battered and bruised, yes, but emerged all the same. She came and took our toddler in her arms, looking up at me with pride. I had finally accomplished something miraculous, something that made her think perhaps she had made the right choice selecting me as her husband.
And then our son peed all over himself.
Posted on October 27, 2024
Lessons from Sue the T-Rex: Why We All Need Moments of Wonder
Last week, I went to Chicago’s Field Museum to visit Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Did you know it’s the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever found? Or that one of the only artificial parts of the skeleton on display is the skull, because the real skull is studied so frequently? Or that Sue was about thirty years old when he/she died? Or that we still don’t know if Sue was a he or a she?
I didn’t know any of this. What I do know is that Sue reminded me that dinosaurs are awesome. More importantly, Sue taught me that we shouldn’t lose track of the simple wonders.
I am in my mid-thirties, happily married, terminally employed, and with a toddler to occupy my every waking moment. That means my finite amount of time—the same 24 hours a day we all share—gets parceled out almost without thought. From waking up to getting ready to sitting at work to working out to changing diapers to making dinner to chores to bed. These are the routines of my week, and they take up the bulk of those 24 hours.
Where is the time to wonder? Not idle curiosity, though that is an important part. I mean the Oxford definition: “A feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.” It’s that tangible feeling when a child encounters something new, with wide eyes and an exclamation of wordless noise because what word could possibly fit such an experience?
At some point, we lose the inclination to wonder. We have seen too much, grown too jaded, or have other things on our minds. We outsource it, crawling through algorithmically provided content hoping for a flash of something that we used to find all around us. Or perhaps we find it vicariously through our children, watching their moments of wonder and feeling nostalgia for when that was us.
While we may lose the inclination, we never lose the ability to wonder. If you still have a soul, you can find those moments. All it takes is two things: stillness to stop the cacophony in your own mind so there’s room for wonder, and the humility to acknowledge there are things in this wide universe of ours far beyond what we know, and that is magical.
That is why I am grateful to Sue. Seeing that T-Rex brought me dozens of small wonders wrapped up in a single experience. I marveled at how a single tooth was the size of my forearm. I gaped at the broken ribs, imagining what titanic struggle Sue had that might have caused them. I shivered at the thought of Sue hunting me, finding myself much lower on the food chain than I’d prefer.
In that exhibit—just for a moment—I was a kid again. That’s a moment I want to have again, looking up at the world in wonder and smiling at the thought of what’s around the next corner.
Posted on October 13, 2024
Our Love is Radioactive: Why Love Needs More Control Rods and Less Firewood
In the yonder days of the internet, there was a brief moment where people realized potatoes make a better metaphor for love than roses. When I first heard this, it opened up a world of terrible metaphors and statements about love that when looked at deeply, make no sense at all—Romeo and Juliet is an allegory about why it’s dumb to make decisions purely off emotion, the statement “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” justifies toxic behavior, and whoever thinks love means never having to say you’re sorry doesn’t know how relationships work.
I will add to this pantheon by taking down another love metaphor. Love is not a fire. Love is a nuclear reactor.
Let’s acknowledge the similarities. Both produce energy, require fuel, and provide light. These are all good things that translate easily to a loving relationship, but each handles them in distinct ways worth considering. Walk through the process of establishing a nuclear reactor, and you’ll see the parallels to a successful relationship.
First, there’s recognizing the need. Reactors don’t pop up like the endless weeds in my garden. They are placed with purpose to fulfil a known need and—just as importantly—needs into the future.
Translation: relationships are more likely to succeed if the partners understand who they are and what they need before getting started. Sure, things will change along the way, but that’s to be expected. The important part is to ensure everyone is on the same page, working towards the same end.
Next is taking the vision from paper to reality. The reactor’s foundation gets laid, support structures get established, and the facility gets connected to the local infrastructure. These aren’t the money maker actions that get all the glitz and glamour, but they are crucial for everything that goes into making a reactor functional.
Translation: everyone wants the end result of a loving relationship, but that doesn’t come from nowhere. There is a ton of effort put into making a relationship work, and most of it isn’t sexy. Everything from meeting friends and family to understanding how partners communicate best matters, and skimping on this part almost guarantees issues down the road.
Now it’s time for the magic. Fuel gets loaded, a neutron source gets added, the control rods lift, and BAM! Fission, baby. The power of the sun in the palm of your hand. Yes, I know that’s fusion, and no, I don’t care. Little bits of stardust split and split again in a chain reaction of energy that eventually comes out of the little sockets on your wall to power your karaoke machine you bought as a joke but now use more religiously than your toothbrush.
Translation: to mix metaphors, this is “The Spark™” modern society constantly gets hung up on. It’s when the focus of a relationship moves from early infatuation to something self-sustaining. Maybe it’s the first time you say “I love you,” or maybe it’s the night you both stay up laughing together till 3 AM and realize you never want it to end. It could be the shared commitment of marriage or an unspoken understanding that this connection is different, deeper. It’s all these things and none of them, and it’s unique to each relationship. What matters is the transition point from the relationship being sustained by external factors to when the internal matters more.
Your reactor is cooking, but you have to make sure its output stays within the appropriate bounds. Too little, and you can’t use your karaoke set. Too much, and HBO gets to make Chernobyl 2: This Time, It’s Personal. This is when you use your control rods and fuel insertion to maintain that smooth, steady flow of energy that keeps all the lights green and the klaxons off.
Translation: relationships aren’t static things, but they generally have a happy place they like to stay within. Doing nothing will lead to the relationship withering, while doing too much can cause it to overheat and explode. This is why it’s important for both partners to understand themselves and what they want out of a relationship, plus for both of them to know how to communicate with each other. Putting in the right amount of effort to keep things growing in a positive way is hard to do as a team. Alone, it’s impossible.
The reactor is now pumping out energy, but the work isn’t done. Up next is the countless hours of maintenance and observation needed to keep the reactor running. People have to update equipment, mend cracks in the foundation, and keep the reactor secure from threats. Reactors can run for decades, outlasting one crop of workers and moving onto the next without a single break in delivering energy.
Translation: you thought the work getting your relationship built on a solid foundation was hard? My friend, that was just the start. Now is when you hope you did your best on building the foundation, because if you didn’t, you can bet you’ll be going back trying to patch over the gaping holes as you try to keep your love from collapsing in on itself. Even if the foundations seemed perfect at the time, you have to check them constantly. Life situations change, and just like a shifting landscape, previously unknown forces can throw things into turmoil.
What about meltdowns? Well, what about them? Everyone gets all in a tizzy over nuclear meltdowns, but in seventy years, only two reactors have had major reactor incidents—Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi. Which has hurt more and caused more damage, nuclear meltdowns or wildfires?
Translation: yes, relationships do end, and yes, sometimes they end badly. But if you put more thought and effort into your relationship than just tossing logs on a fire and hoping things don’t spiral out of control, you’re far more likely to succeed in maintaining that relationship in a healthy way for both partners.
Congratulations, you now have a successful nuclear reactor! Unlike a fire that is harder to control and can burn out (or out of control) quickly, your firmly established and well-cared for reactor will provide a constant stream of energy for years to come. Now go find your partner, look them lovingly in the eye, and say the words every woman or man wants to hear:
“You’re my critical mass.”
Posted on September 29, 2024
Through Fire and Fluff: How I Survived a Kitchen Calamity
The flash point for your average marshmallow is 200 degrees Fahrenheit. I know this because my wife attempted to burn down our house with marshmallows a few days ago.
I was in our office when the cry for help came. My wife has very distinct tones for different scenarios. There’s the “standard operations” tone for normal situations, the “I’m tolerating this because for some reason I still love you” tone for when I go hard on puns, and my personal favorite, “Mama Bear is gonna’ cut you” tone for when she thinks someone has mistreated our son.
This time, however, it was the “things have escalated” tone. Given how competent my wife usually is, this tone is used as often as a hurricane alarm in North Dakota. I jerked upright and ran to the kitchen, ready for anything from a knife wound to an intruder soon to have a knife wound.
Fortunately, there was no blood or intruder. Unfortunately, our oven was on fire. On the top rack sat an entire tray of marshmallows, burning merrily away as though an entire Boy Scout troop had set up shop in our kitchen. I was torn on which hurt more, the potential loss of our house or the sure loss of whatever my wife had been baking.
My wife and I made eye contact. This is one of those moments where two people who know each other well can have an entire conversation in the single beat of synchronized hearts without saying a word. Ours went something like this:
“What did you do?” I asked, knowing the answer but needing to have it confirmed anyways.
“Does that really matter right now?” she countered, as the kitchen began smelling like a campfire gone horribly wrong.
“Fair. This would be an excellent time to know if our homeowner’s insurance covers marshmallow-based arson.”
“Or you could just focus and put the fire out before that becomes an issue.”
“Ahh, that makes sense. I’ll get right on that.”
“Wait!”
“Yes?”
“Try and save the marshmallows—I need them for a recipe I’m trying.”
I looked at the roaring flames in our oven, then back to my wife. “Yeah, I don’t see that happening.”
Plan of action in hand, I leapt to my wife’s defense. Luckily, we had prepared for just such a culinary emergency by buying a fire extinguisher. I threw the sink cupboard open, grabbed the extinguisher, and rose like a 90s action hero ready to save the day and win the girl. I aimed at my adversary and uttered my catchphrase: “You’re fired.”
I pulled the trigger. But instead of a white fountain of justice, all I got was a soft click. Looking down, I saw that the safety pin was still in place. “I can salvage this”, I thought to myself. “Just think how cool this will look to my wife when I pull the pin and toss it across the room like a matador twirling his cape.”
Alas, it was not to be. You know that little plastic tab that they helpfully put on fire extinguishers to ensure the pin doesn’t fall out in transit? Yeah, that was still locking in the pin. The phrase hero to zero crossed my mind, and I considered whether or not throwing the extinguisher at the fire would be a suitable last act of defiance.
Thankfully, my wife recognized the problem and intervened. She whipped out a pair of junk drawer scissors like a sheriff facing down a desperado at high noon pulling out her six shooter. The tab got cut, the pin got removed, and I was back in the fight.
I turned to face the foe once more, and started with an updated catchphrase: “If you can’t handle the heat…”
“Put the fire out!” my wife yelled.
“…get out of the kitchen,” I muttered under my breath as I pulled the trigger. White foam covered the luminous marshmallows, and the crisis was at an end. I stood there, triumphant in my moment of victory, prepared to humbly receive my well-deserved accolades.
Instead, my wife went over to the tray of marshmallows and prodded their charcoal husks with a fork. “I think I can salvage these.”
Maybe I needed a better catchphrase.
Updated on September 15, 2024
Yellowstone and Grand Tetons: A Haiku-tiful Experience
My wife and I decided life wasn’t challenging enough, so we decided to do a five-day road trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons with our toddler. Remarkably, he took mercy on us and behaved like a champ. While a pleasant surprise, the unrealized emotional tension snapped back into my eye like a misfired rubber band. Instead of focusing on taming the toddler, I had only one item to direct my attention towards: the endless, all-consuming expanse that is Wyoming.
If you have not driven through Wyoming, don’t—they have airports. If you insist on doing so anyways, you must prepare yourself. Otherwise, you will find your mind wandering far afield from its usual haunts. In will plumb the depths of untrod neural pathways, seeking desperately for some relief from the monotony of endless brown.
In my head, this settled onto one phrase: the Haiku Review. Why haikus? I have no idea. Why a review? Because I knew I needed to do a Wandering, and why not talk about two of the most beloved national parks in America.
Without further ado, please enjoy the first iteration of the Haiku Review: Yellowstone and Grand Tetons edition.
Vast plains stretch ahead,
Endless sky, road never ends—
There are no bathrooms.
Who needed the stop,
Toddler or grown man? Who knows—
Dinos thrill us both.
Cautionary sign.
Child slips, geyser erupts—
Oops, there goes the kid.
Pretty pool bubbles.
Fingers itch, a dangerous game—
Ouch, hot, 9-1-1.
Bison, lone and wild.
Other animals missing—
Must have missed memo.
Old Faithful erupts
Two minutes behind schedule—
Got my money back.
Massive log cabin,
Majestic, peaceful, serene—
Tourists everywhere.
Gorgeous waterfall.
Toddler tried his best to jump—
No swimming for you.
Grandest of Tetons,
Peaks scrape the azure above—
Switzerland got lost.
Milky Way, so bright.
Mosquitos, pesky, buzzing pests—
Stars obscured by bites.
Beaver’s grin calls you,
Pilgrims gather, carts in hand—
Gas station or cult?
Road trip, finally done.
Miles traveled, memories made—
Home sweet home at last
Posted on August 26, 2024
War is Gardening by Other Means: My Battle with the Weeds
I have never had much of a green thumb, but Colorado has done its best to remedy that. Unfortunately, its tool of choice has been weeds. It also decided to get a head start, with the weeds in our yard well-fortified and prepared to resist a ground assault weeks before we moved in.
Having already dealt with the wasp menace, I now had the maneuver space to take on this next foe. I went out, reached down to grab a weed grown to hip height, and promptly let go as its thorns plunged deep into my flesh like a rabid rat going after a slice of three-day old pizza.
“A general should never take too much on his own shoulders,” I said to myself. “What I need to do here is delegate.”
“That’s a great way to rationalize laziness,” I replied.
“How much blood do you want to lose pulling these weeds?” I retorted.
Internal rhetorical battle won, I lit the beacons and called for aid. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more.
Little did I know, yard work is a hot commodity here in the local area. I had multiple companies tell me they were too busy for new clients, and others apparently too busy to even pick up the phone. Meanwhile, I watched the weeds complete their hostile takeover of my exterior yard. They named their new territory Weedlandia and established a rudimentary form of governance that would be impressive if not for the aggressive posture they established on the borders of my lawn.
Then, as all hope seemed lost, a light. One company I had reached out to days earlier finally heard my call for aid and chose to answer. Plans were made for a walkthrough to provide an estimate. I mocked the weeds and told them their days were numbered. They waved back in the wind, unconcerned. I should have seen that for the sign it was.
The day of the estimate arrived, and my ally appeared. I knew at once that this man, no, this hero, would restore balance in my life. He got right to business, assessing the battlefield like Napoleon atop his steed. I could feel the weeds quiver in fear at his passing, and I reveled in it.
The landscape legionary finished his walkthrough, then turned to face me. “We can do it for seventeen sixty,” he said.
My first thought, I’m shamed to admit, was joy. A mere $17.60? Has righteous judgement ever been delivered on such an efficient budget before? I think not!
Then the rest of my brain caught up. “$1,760?” I clarified.
“Yep,” he said.
Ladies and gentlemen, I do not have a large yard. It is by no means cramped, but it is also no Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Twenty good steps will take you from one end to the other, and most of that is grass the weeds have yet to conquer.
Let me frame it another way. If I went to the bank and asked for 1,760 dollar bills, I would have more than enough to sew together into an awning I could use to starve every weed in my yard of sunlight, killing them just as well as my so-called hero might have done had I delivered those dollars to him instead.
I thanked the man for his time, said we would not be needing his services, and sent him on his way. The weeds—already familiar with landscaping economics on the Front Range—rustled with laughter.
The next day, I dug through a tool box and found a pair of gloves. I then spent an hour pulling out the vast majority of weeds in my yard, save for a few I elected to keep alive as test subjects for an upcoming round of chemical warfare.
As I stood upon my porch looking out over the devastation of my enemies, I felt mixed emotions. On one hand, there was the satisfactions of seeing my foe brought low, their few ragged remnants twitching halfheartedly in the wind as they stared in shock at the results of what their pride had brought them.
On the other hand, tearing out the waist high weeds really accentuated how half of my lawn is dead or dying. But that, dear reader, is a war I have yet to fight.
Posted on August 11, 2024
A Man, A Wasp Nest, and a Lesson in Critical Thinking
I have a swollen lump on my thigh about the size of a tennis ball. It’s red. It itches. All in all, an unpleasant experience—zero stars, would not recommend. Why, you ask, do I have a red, itching lump on my thigh? Because, I answer, I am a man. This means I am large in stature, but occasionally stumble when it comes to critical thinking.
Three days ago, my son and I decided to spend some time in our backyard together. He loves to run and I love to watch him run and tire himself out before bedtime. Everyone wins. After a solid round of wind sprints, he decided to take a rest on one of the patio chairs near our propane firepit.
Enter the wasps. You see, at some point during the previous owner’s tenure, a horror of wasps decided to nest in the interior of the firepit where the propane tank goes. I have no evidence that this is why they left it for us, but you could say the circumstances kindled my suspicions. Regardless, I was well aware at this point in time that they festered within the dark crevices of the firepit, awaiting the smallest of provocations to unleash their fury upon the world.
This is where I blacked out. I have spent the last three nights staring at the ceiling, wondering what could have possibly possessed me to do what I did next. I have no answers. Were I in the court of law, I would claim temporary insanity. Given that I was tried in the court of marriage, I claimed temporary stupidity. My loving wife is convinced of the second part, but has her reservations on the first.
Regardless, what happened next is I stood up from the chair, walked to the firepit, and threw open the propane tank access door. Upon opening it, I discovered the largest wasp nest west of the Mississippi hanging off the inside of said access door.
The wasps, needless to say, were upset. They charged out to do battle like the Mongol hordes across the Eastern European steppes, their multifaceted eyes filled with rage and bloodlust. I, being a man, did the age-old dance of men who have startled dangerous insects—a graceful combination of flailing arms and high knees while executing a slow to moderately paced rotation.
Midway through my first rotation, I realized that my two-year-old son was well within the blast radius of the wasp apocalypse. This is when I experienced my very own “suburban mother lifts car off child” moments and threw caution to the wind as I leapt to his defense. I swatted one wasp away from him, swept him off the chair, and sprinted with him back to the safety of the house held over my head like a thirty-five-pound Simba getting presented to the animals he would soon eat.
We made it inside and shut the glass door, a barrier wasp-kind has yet to figure out how to overcome. I hugged my child close, checked him for any bites or stings, then set him down and turned to face my judgement at the hands of my wife. I had one move to make at this moment, and I made it:
“That was incredibly stupid of me to do,” I said.
She opened her mouth, closed it, looked at me. “Yeah, that was dumb.”
It was at that point I looked down at my thigh and saw the rapidly swelling red spot. I had saved my son, but the Gods of Stupidity still demanded their pound of flesh. All I can say in my defense is that the wasps may have won the battle, but a can of Raid and a size ten boot ensured that I eventually won the war.
