Things I didn't accomplish in 2015

(1) Learn how to speak Latin. This is mostly because, like the guy who complains about not winning the lottery but never actually buys a ticket, I didn't technically study Latin this year. Still, I consider it a failure.

(2) Figure out how to drive a stick shift. Again, I never actually tried doing this, but the fact remains that, as was the case a year ago, I still can't drive a car with a manual transmission.

(3) Spend the time I want to spend with my kids. Yeah, yeah, I have to earn a living to support them and all, which takes a lot of time. There are probably a million excuses I can make. But the fact is I fell short in this area. Again. Gotta do better in 2016.

(4) Write my wife a poem. Or a song or something. I really should do that. I used to make up very Caucasian rap songs about her when we were dating. Like, on the spot. I could improvise quickly. Not so much anymore. That's a skill I ought to dust off because, really, who DOESN'T want to listen to a 46-year-old suburban (read: white) guy rap about his main squeeze?

(5) Read through the Bible in a year. I've only ever actually done this one time, and it was the year 2000. I should be doing this every year. I didn't make it a priority. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also...

(6) Learn to play in the altissimo register on the saxophone. This is a band geeky thing. For you non-musicians – or non-saxophonists, really – the saxophone naturally has a range to high F (some saxes have a key that lets you reach high F-sharp). It's possible to play much higher than that, but you have to learn what is called "altissimo"playing, which is in some ways a very controlled squeak. Something to do with "overtones" and other musical terms. It's difficult but not impossible. Or at least I assume it is, because I never learned it. It's a life goal. I'm going to make it happen.

(7) Run every day. I always say I want to start doing this because I'm inspired when I visit runeveryday.com and read about people who have run at least a mile every day for 5, 10, 15, 20 or more years (two guys actually have streaks of 45 or more years, as certified by the who-knew-they-existed United States Running Streak Association). But my body does not cooperate with this wish. I tear a calf muscle just sitting here thinking about it. I may not have the build ever to actually achieve this, but I'll keep trying.

So what's it like there in the future?

Dear Blog Readers from Another Time,

As this post is being written on Thursday, October 29, 2015, I am very excited to have the chance to communicate with you, the denizens of The Future.

I guess my main question is what life is like where you live in late December? How have things changed? For example, do you still have the Internet? You may not. You may have something completely different. In my time, the Internet was a complex digital network we used primarily to forward emails with non-factual political information to each other. And to swap pictures of cats. And, if I'm being honest here, videos of naked people. LOTS of videos of naked people.

I was also going to ask whether you all travel around via jetpacks, but I realize that's silly because the vision of universal jetpacks NEVER seems to come true, no matter how advanced we as a civilization become. This is confusing, though, because it doesn't seem like particularly complex technology. Maybe you're making strides in this area in your time?

What about sports? I and others like me are avid sports fans here in The Distant Past. I am particularly interested in Cleveland sports. Honestly, back here in October 2015, most Cleveland sports teams are dismal. The exception is our basketball team, the Cavaliers. Are they still competitive in your time? Is Lebron James still playing? Or did he retire? He was a very good basketball player. You may know of him.

Who is the president in your era? Here in October 2015 the president is Barack Obama. Many people here don't like him, which kind of makes me sad because, as much as I disagree with him on certain things, I do like him. I think he and I would get along well together. Is he still alive in your time? Did anyone ever figure out whether he was, in fact, a Kenyan Muslim operative? Or was that just something I read in one of the emails mentioned above?

Anyway, the very fact that you're reading this shows that this blog still exists, which is good, because I have a habit of blogging for several months at a time, then stopping because I claim I don't have any time, then starting up again saying I suddenly do have time, then stopping again, etc. But if my blog is still around in your era, it means something is going right in my life.

Of course, that's assuming I'm even still alive by the time this runs. You never know. I write these posts so far ahead that I may die tomorrow and no one will know because Scott's blog posts just keep showing up week after week.

Well, I appreciate the fact that you took the time to read this, especially if our society has changed so much by your time that we don't even speak or read English anymore. We may have moved on to an entirely new universal language, in which case I appreciate the effort it must take for you to translate these words in your head as you watch them on your advanced personal hologram screen or whatever.

Thanks for reading/deciphering. If you can, please keep the future as clean as possible, as we in this time all plan to get there eventually and would appreciate not having to clean up after you upon our arrival. Take care, and I'll see you soon.

Your pal from the past,
Scott

It's Christmas. Get off the computer and/or your phone and go tell your family you love them.

Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, tell them you love them anyway. You don't need a holiday to do that.

Seriously, I'm not writing a post for you people today because you don't need one.

Go be with your family. Or a friend. Or at the very least go do something in which you'll be in the vicinity of other people.

And whether you're Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Rastafarian, or you worship The Great Green Arkleseizure, I want you to have a Merry Christmas. Can you go and do that for me?

Thank you. See you Monday.

Top four things I think about while driving to and from work

(1) People are idiots
It's not so much that they can't drive. I'm sure most are actually quite capable of driving well. It's that they refuse to drive in anything other than a selfish, reckless manner. Stop it! Stop driving that way! You're going to kill the both of us! Will you be satisfied then? (NOTE: That's something your mom would say, isn't it?)

(2) What I am going to do when gas costs $20 a gallon?
Because that's going to happen, apparently. At least according to a book titled, creatively enough, "$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better." I haven't read the book, but I do know that we in the U.S. pay an absurdly low price for gas, at least in comparison to drivers in many (most) other countries. But if it gets to the point that I can no longer afford the gas required for my 70-mile daily roundtrip commute, I suppose my only alternative will be to become a shepherd. The pay isn't great, but the exercise and outdoor time make up for it.

(3) Who are all these people and where are they going?
There aren't that many people in the whole Cleveland area who have jobs, are there? Because if so, 100% of them are apparently on the road with me at any given time. Seriously, they must all just follow me around. This isn't Chicago, New York or L.A. This is Northeast Ohio. We don't DO traffic here. WHO ARE ALL OF THESE PEOPLE?

(4) Seriously, people are idiots
I want to come back to this point because I can never stress it enough, either to you or to myself. Driving on an interstate is a borderline suicidal activity. There's a healthy chance that, on any given day, someone driving near you will do something stupid, thus causing you to wreck and potentially ending your life. Yet millions of us still do it every day. What are we thinking? These people (NOTE: "These people" is defined as "anyone who doesn't drive exactly as I think they should.") are maniacs!

Things that happen in movies but never in the world where I live

(NOTE: This is our monthly Blog Rerun, where we bring back a post from years gone by. This one originally ran on June 19, 2012. And now it's running on December 21, 2015. So there's that...)

People end phone conversations abruptly without saying goodbye
In the movies, people will be talking on the phone and say something like, "I'll meet you at 8 at the IHOP," and then they'll hang up the phone without another word. Just like that. Does this happen to you? It never happens to me. If I'm talking to someone on the phone and it's clear the conversation is over, one of us will say something like, "OK, talk to you soon." And the other one will say, "Great. Bye!" And then we'll hang up together in a mutually agreeable way. It could be that this is just too boring and mundane for movie dialogue. But if a movie is supposed to reflect reality in some way (at least to the point that I the viewer can relate to it), I'm willing to invest a few extra seconds if it means that phone conversations will end politely.

Everyone sleeps naked
OK, not everyone in the movies takes their clothes off to sleep. Like, if it's a middle-aged suburban couple or something, the husband will wear a full set of pajamas and the wife will have on a boring nightgown. That's to be expected. But other than kids, everyone else in the movies seems to sleep au naturale. Maybe I'm just not in touch with the average person here, but I do not sleep naked. Ever. Do you? Am I just an old fuddy duddy at the age of 42? I wear a t-shirt and shorts to bed. Not boxer shorts, actual athletic shorts. I am perfectly willing to admit I may be in the minority here, but you'll note that the title of this post is things that happen in movies "but never in the world where I live." (NOTE: If it's true that a higher proportion of movie characters sleep in the nude than in real life, I suspect this is because actors, for the most part, have nicer bodies than you or me. And there's a demand to see them unclothed. Understood and acknowledged. All I'm saying is, what's with all the nekkid people in movie beds?)

Doors burst open with the slightest kick
This is an unscientific observation here, insofar as I have never actually attempted to kick down a door. But it seems in the movie world that all doors are made of balsa wood. You don't have to be particularly big or strong to demolish a door in a movie. Are doors really that fragile? Has any blog reader ever actually kicked down a door? I need a ruling on this. If you have, in fact, pulled a Jean Claude Van Damme on a door, please let us know. I would be surprised if it's as easy in real life as it seems to be onscreen.

High schools all look like country clubs
Granted, more often than not, a high school in a movie is set in California, because so many movies are set in California. And growing up in Ohio, one is led to believe that everything in California is nicer than everything in the Midwest. I've been to California several times, though, and I can tell you that while the state has many lovely buildings, not all of them are better than what we have in Ohio. Yet so many high schools in movies look like luxury hotels. And class changes are often done outside, which I get is possible in sunny California versus, say, Cleveland in February. But still, do California kids all attend high-end private high schools? And if so, why didn't my parents move there back in the 80s?

Motivating the unmotivated child

I have a child who for purposes of this discussion shall remain anonymous. We will refer to this child as "Pat," which as Saturday Night Live viewers know can be either a male or a female name.

Pat is very intelligent. Pat has talents that he/she/it is either unaware of, or chooses to ignore because acknowledging those talents' existence might mean there is work to be done. And Pat avoids work whenever possible.

Pat gets very good grades. Those grades could be in the "excellent" range if Pat would be willing to give more than the minimum effort required.

Actually, the effort Pat puts into doing "just enough" is impressive. Pat expends more energy getting just above the line of what's required than he/she/it would if they actually, you know, tried their best. If you look at Pat's grades online, you will see a long line of percentages at or just above the 90% mark: 90.3, 90.1, 90.4, 93.1 (that last class is one that requires a 93% for an 'A').

Because our educational system tends to reward a just-good-enough effort, Pat sees no need to go above and beyond the level of effort that Pat is currently giving. This works now, but it will not work later in life. Terry and I try to tell Pat this, but the message falls on deaf ears.

How do I get Pat to understand all the possibilities that are out there for him/her/itself if he/she/it WOULD JUST BEAR DOWN A LITTLE AND TRY. JUST TRY, PAT! THAT'S ALL I'M ASKING!

I have three possible solutions:

(a) Show Pat pictures of homeless people sleeping on the street and emphasize that this could very easily be Pat in 10 years.

(b) Actually make Pat sleep in the street with the homeless people to drive this point home.

(c) Repeatedly bludgeon Pat's thick skull with a heavy object in the hope that this action will beat some sense into Pat.

I'm thinking about going with option (d) "all of the above."

Five more reasons why my wife can't ever die

(1) If she goes and I'm suddenly in charge of the cooking, we would essentially have the same four meals over and over and over. Eventually the kids would rebel and throw me out of the house. That would be unpleasant.

(2) She paints well. And while I know she doesn't exactly love painting walls and stuff, she definitely hates it far less than I do. So I need her around to paint things.

(3) She's the only one willing to pull out all the honeysuckle that grows along our driveway. Without her, it would eventually overrun everything, including the inside of our house.

(4) If you leave the grocery shopping to me, I would only think to buy things I want. I would get home and realize the children had nothing to eat at all, and rather than going back to the store, I would just give each of them $50 in grocery money and let them fend for themselves. Which would of course mean a house full of mac and cheese, Krave cereal, and popsicles. Fun, but not especially healthy.

(5) She's the only one with the ability to clean out the little holes on the dishwasher spray arms when they get clogged. If she's gone and the dishwasher stops working, that would be it. We would just start cramming old socks in there or something, because I can guarantee you there would never be another dish washed in it again.

Man, do I miss my World Book Encyclopedias

When I was growing up, we had a full set of World Book Encyclopedias on our living room bookshelf, and I devoured them.

I don't mean I ate them, I mean I read them. Just to clarify.

Here's exactly what they looked like:

And I'm not kidding when I say I read them. I would literally open up a volume and just read whatever article I found. This is a main reason why I'm so good at general-knowledge trivia. Seriously, a lot of the weird stuff I know came from reading the 1964 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.

There were, though, certain articles that I came back to time and again. "Snakes" was one. "Space Travel" was another. I also remember them having cool plastic overlays illustrating the different organ systems of the human body. Not sure if that was part of the "Anatomy" entry or what.

Still, there was no article I turned up more often than the one on "U.S. Presidents." The pages for that entry were torn and dog-eared from use. I can still picture the two-page spread in which the World Book editors very helpfully laid out head shots of all the presidents from beginning to end, from Washington to Lyndon Johnson (this was, remember, the 1964 edition).

I memorized those photos to the point that I could recite the presidents in order by the age of 6. My dad took me to the Hob Nob, the neighborhood bar down the street, a couple of times and had me show off my little presidents trick. The friendly drunks there were very appreciative of my skills, and both times I did it, Doris the barmaid gave me a free Coke. Not a bad deal.

Anyway, I used those World Book Encyclopedias a lot throughout my school career, usually as the basis for some written assignment or other. Like, for example, I remember having the "V" volume open at the kitchen table while I wrote out a report on the state of Vermont. Later reports depended heavily on Volume "I" for Iceland, "D" for diphtheria, and "R" for my favorite president of all, Teddy Roosevelt.

I later went to college in the late 80s and early 90s, which you geezers will remember was still essentially the pre-Internet age, so the World Books even helped me out as an undergraduate.

Then, in the mid-90s when personal computers came out with CD-ROM drives, the encyclopedia people started putting their stuff onto CDs. Which at the time was pretty cool. "All of those encyclopedias on this ONE tiny disc?" As you might imagine, it was a lot cheaper – both for the manufacturer and for the consumer – to produce encyclopedias on CD rather than heavy-bound books.

And so printed encyclopedias started to go away. Do any of them even exist anymore? I know the Encyclopedia Brittanica stopped putting out a print version a few years ago. Hold on, let me go and check if World Book is still killing trees...

You guys, they are! I just went to worldbook.com and was so pleased to see that you can STILL get a complete printed version of the 2016 World Book Encyclopedia for the low, low price of...$1,099.

Yeah, that's a little steep.

God bless the Internet.

Guess I'd better start my Christmas shopping soon...

I'm not normally a procrastinator, but I rarely start shopping for Christmas presents much before, oh, round about now, I guess.

Yeah, two weeks before the holiday is usually about right for me. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But two weeks is pretty much my norm.

I fall right into Guy Stereotype #47 in that I do not especially enjoy shopping. I come up with a list of specific items before I leave the house, and then I go looking for those specific items. Once I find them, I go home. I generally do not buy anything else. As soon as everything on my list is checked off, I stop.

Then, at some point soon after, I wrap those same gifts. And I finish the whole thing as soon as possible in the same way I try and finish scooping out the cat litter boxes every morning. It's just another to-do that needs to be completed.

I actually don't mind crowds and traffic this time of year. To me they come with the territory, and a store full of people has a Christmas-like quality to it (Which is sad, isn't it? Because that suggests that buying stuff is the No. 1 thing I associate with Christmas. My bad.)

What I don't like is not finding the things on my list. So that's why I plan so extensively before I venture out to shop. I want to walk in, find what I need, buy it, and walk out.

Sometime this works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't work, I admittedly get a little frustrated.

So here's a holiday tip: If you're someone to whom I give a Christmas present, please check with me first for my List of Approved Stores at which I'm willing to shop. Also be prepared to tell me exactly where inside those stores I can find your desired item.

That's what Terry does and it works great for both of us.

Merry Christmas!

Those few seconds when you just stare at your child

I was looking at my son Jared the other day. He didn't know I was looking at him, which is good because it would have been a bit weird and creepy, with me just staring at him and all.

But you parents know what I'm talking about, right? Sometimes you just look at your child. You do it when they're infants and they're sleeping. And you do it when they're older, too. You can't help it.

When I was looking at Jared, I was thinking a lot of different things. I thought about how grown up he is. I thought about how physically big he is. I thought what a shame it was that my dad never got the chance to see him play soccer or kick a football. (Trust me, Bob Tennant would have LOVED watching his grandkids play high school sports. He would have been a permanent fixture at Wickliffe High School. Heck, he came to most of my football PRACTICES. The man was a true fan.)

Sometimes you look at your kids and you think what a genuine miracle they are. I imagine this is especially true for the mothers who actually birth them because, you know, you grew a kid inside of you. In less than a year, that child formed inside of you and burst into the world. And now, well, here they are. Amazing.

You also look at your kids and worry a little. Even if there's not really anything specific to worry about, you worry anyway because that's what you do. Right there in the parent job description it says, "Must be willing to worry about child even when you can't quite pinpoint exactly what you're worrying about."

I guess we worry about whether we've done our jobs right in raising them. We worry about how they're doing in school and in life. We worry about whether we've taught them the things they need to know.

All of this flickered through my mind when I looked over at Jared as we were driving to a hockey game together. And in that moment I felt a love so intense for him it was a little jarring.

You always love your kids, of course. But there are moments when you remember how much you love them, and it hits you hard. For most of us, we love because we ourselves were loved. We are bound to pass that love along as part of a relationship that is simultaneously the most rewarding and most difficult thing we do in this life.

And all the while, The Boy was looking down at his phone, no doubt absorbed in checking the performance of his fantasy football team or reading up on how the Browns – his favorite football team and mine – have managed to screw up in some new and creative way.

He was oblivious, but that's OK. It's not his time yet. One day he'll feel the same love for his own child, and only then will he realize that his own parents felt the same way about him. You can't fully understand it until you're ready to give it to someone else. That's the nature of it. And like I said, that's OK.

I stared at him a few more seconds, and then the light that had us stopped in Downtown Cleveland turned green. So I turned my attention back to the road. But I still loved him.

I'll always love him.

World War II was a lot more real when I was growing up

Does that make sense? Do you know what I mean?

This year marks the 70th anniversary since the end of the Second World War. And of course today is December 7th, Pearl Harbor Day, commemorating 74 years since the Japanese sneak attack on U.S. Navy installations in Hawaii. That's the event that brought the U.S. into the war and kept it there until the very end.

When I was a kid, there were WWII veterans all over the place. They're still with us, but there are a lot fewer of them every day, and the ones who are left are older and, well, quieter, I guess.

The WWII vets I knew often told stories about their experiences when I was growing up. Or at least the ones who didn't mind talking about their service did. Others had such harrowing memories of combat that they never discussed them.

Mine is the last generation of people that had dads who fought in the war. And even then I'm really at the tail end of that class. My dad entered the Army in 1946, a year after the war officially ended, and served in the Occupation Army of Japan. And he was older than most of my friends' dads.

So my experience of the war was more third-hand than anything else. But even in the 1970s and 80s, you heard about the war more than you do now. Which is understandable, because it's slowly fading into a more distant past. We'll have WWII vets around for many more years, but their numbers will drop precipitously as time goes on. They already have, really.

I know this partly because I am particularly interested in the First World War, and the last few veterans of that conflict died out in the past five years or so. (This Wikipedia article provides a good summary.) I've read and studied so much about "the Great War" for so many years that it has become somewhat personal to me, even though I obviously don't know anyone who fought in it.

So when the last WWI veterans passed in the early part of this decade, I felt like that really shut the door on an era of history. The First World War brought about a wealth of technological advances, but it was still in some ways very much a 19th-century war, with horsed cavalry and bright uniforms (early on, at least) and things we associate more with the Civil War than "modern" military operations.

Those 100-plus-year-old First World War vets were our last direct and human links to one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of mankind. Their deaths meant we could only relate to that war through the written and recorded word.

And the same will one day soon be true of the Second World War. It's a conflict whose flame will burn brighter and longer here in the U.S. simply because we were so much more deeply involved in it, but eventually those living, breathing connections to this momentous historic event will be gone.

And I guess that makes me sad. Especially on Pearl Harbor Day, when our country was finally awakened from the blissfully ignorant thought that maybe we can just keep ourselves out of foreign conflicts and "Those People" will simply leave us alone.

It's not so much history that repeats itself, folks, as the lessons of history.

Here's wishing a blessed Pearl Harbor Day to those men and women who lived through it and are still around to talk about it.

There's no way I should be looking at my phone half as much as I do

Whenever I leave the house, I check my pockets to ensure I have three things on me:

• My car keys
• My wallet
• My iPhone

If you were to tell me I had to leave one of these things behind, I would put my wallet back in the dresser and make sure I wasn't in a position where I would need it. If you were to tell me I had to leave two of these things at home, I would immediately drop my wallet and car keys and unhesitatingly walk wherever I was headed.

This is both true and sad.

I look at my phone all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. I look it at while I'm standing at a urinal. Really, I do.

Because apparently I need to know 24/7 whether someone has commented on my Facebook status, whether my tweet has been favorited, or whether an extremely non-urgent work email has popped into my inbox in the past four minutes. And sometimes I just suddenly need to play an emergency game of electronic cribbage.

I cannot simply exist. I cannot just sit there and think. If there's a lull in a conversation or a break in whatever action I'm engaged in, I must fill in that time with phone browsing.

And most of the time, that's all I'm really doing: browsing. Just looking. Just checking to see if any life-changing information has come across my phone that I absolutely must know right this minute.

More than 99% of the time, I find nothing that couldn't have waited five more minutes. Or 10 more minutes. Or an hour. Or until tomorrow.

I am truly addicted, though it's not the phone itself to which I'm addicted. And it's not even the phone's output that has me hooked. It's the promise of finding something funny/interesting/uplifting/useful that drives me. Just that little bit of potential, rarely fulfilled, is enough to make me look at my phone every few minutes throughout my waking hours.

And I need to stop it. I know this. I need to stop it.

But that's so much easier said than done. I want to go back to a time when I could simply sit still for awhile and think. Or not even think. Just BE.

Yet I've lost the capacity to act that way. How? How did this happen? When did I and others like me lose the ability to be disconnected? I'd like to figure that out.

You don't know how close I just came to hopping on my phone to Google "phone addiction."

I can only remember things that are practically of no use to me

Exactly 13 years ago today was my first day as an employee of Dix & Eaton, the Cleveland PR firm where I worked for nearly four years and which provided me with a wealth of valuable experience and skills.

I am the only person in the world to whom this anniversary matters, and even I don't really care about it. Dates like this just stay in my head and I can't get rid of them.

Things I really, really want to remember – like where I put the iPad charger or the name of my wife's favorite Starbucks drink – come and go in my brain. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don't. But I know the exact start date of every single job I've ever had, with the exception of the few months when I was a dishwasher at Tizzano's Restaurant back in the summer of 1985. (Though I know my first day there was in June.)

The only time this type of information comes in handy is when I'm filling out an application, like for a job or a loan or something. I don't have to go to the trouble of looking back through my records because all of the relevant dates are readily accessible in my mind.

But when someone asks me a question to which I really should know the answer, and to which I really want to know the answer, I'm often stumped. Why didn't they ask who hosted "Joker's Wild" in the 70s? That I know. But instead they ask for something that's actually, you know, useful and relevant and all of that, and I can't help them.

Why are we wired this way? Why does our brain collect facts that will never, ever be needed again and hold on to them as if they were winning lotto tickets? And why does it discard the stuff that should be right at the front of our cerebral file cabinets?

I want an answer. Mind you, I won't actually remember that answer once someone explains it to me, but on the plus side, I will be able to rattle off for them all of the U.S. presidents born in Ohio. That's useful, right?