The End of the Hair Project

I am extremely late with this post. You, dear reader, have my apologies.

As you will recall from previous posts, my 02008 New Year's Resolution was to try my best to resist the urge to cut my hair, with the ultimate goal of donating it to Locks of Love.

With just one week left in the year, my resolve to keep my hair uncut was still intact. However, my attention was brought to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program, with its 8 inch requirement (which was better for me than Locks of Love's 10 inches). Well, I finally reached 8 inches in June!

Here are the May 2, 02009 photos:


Three days after those photos were taken, Beth could live with my long hair no longer. She decided it was haircut day, and she gave me my shearing. The next day, I stopped in for a visit to my barber for a bit of a cleaning up. These photos show the results:


Now I feel very much less like a total doofus!

Last week, I received a letter of thanks from Beautiful Lengths. So I know that my hair reached its destination. Mission accomplished!

Musical Discovery

One of my coworkers decided a few days ago that she was sick of the music on her iPod. (She used the word "hate", but I don't think it was entirely accurate.) So she proposed an iPod swap. I went for it, and we've spent a few hours on each of the last few days listening to each others' collections.

This is a wonderful exercise, which I highly recommend to anyone who is in a position to do it.

My greatest joy of the exercise, so far, has been the discovery of a singer/songwriter named Joanna Newsom. I am absolutely hooked, and intend to buy her albums when funds become available. She has this magnificently unconventional singing voice which she uses to great effect with a unique delivery. Plus, the woman is a rhyme machine!

My favorite lyric goes like this:

I killed my dinner with karate -
kick 'em in the face, taste the body;

This artist is definitely my musical discovery of the year, and I can make no stronger suggestion to you, reader, than this: Listen to Joanna Newsom!

You can find a page of her fantastic rhymes here.

You can get a sample of her sound by checking out the video here.

02009 New Year's Resolutions #21 and #22: Optimism and Gratitude

I recently found out that I am scheduled to be part of a big round of layoffs from my full-time job. My scheduled date of termination is July 3.

This is the sort of news that could be fairly devastating. (In this case, it is not.)

I am being uncharacteristically optimistic. In fact, I have generally been keeping on the optimistic end of the scale for the last few months.

This is a strange sensation.

I, as you may or may not already know, am a world-class pessimist (despite my "be positive" blood type). This is not a point of pride. It is simply a statement of truth. My longstanding habit has been to always believe that things will go badly. To some degree, this acts as a bit of a built-in cushion. Rarely do things go as badly as I anticipate, and I'm therefore generally pleased with outcomes. However, when outcomes do turn out to be awful, at least they don't come as a shock.

When I was in college, I took an Abnormal Psychology course. My professor was Martin E. P. Seligman, a guy who (a) had the most soothing male voice in the world and (b) wrote a book entitled Learned Optimism. I did not ever get around to reading the whole book. But I read enough to grasp that the basic premises were (a) that it's possible to train oneself to be optimistic and (b) that being optimistic has definite benefits.

Which leads me to my twenty-first New Year's Resolution of the year (and no, it does not involve reading the aforementioned book):

I resolve to be more optimistic than is my natural tendency.

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As it happens, just four days before I learned that I am being laid off, I was hired to a new part-time job. This is a job that I had wanted for over ten months, ever since I first heard of it. The way I heard of it is that Beth told me about it. She had heard about it from a former coworker who had started working for this company a few months earlier and told Beth about it when he stopped in to visit her workplace. So I contacted him in early June of 02008 and then bugged him every few months to ensure that he would not forget to let me know when an opening occurred.

Well, he e-mailed me in April and let me know that an opening was available for a part-time position. I wanted the job to be full-time, but at least this was a chance to get my foot in the door. So I contacted the appropriate people, had an interview, and got hired. I still hope that it becomes my next full-time job. Clearly, with the impending loss of my current full-time job, the ideal timing for the switch would be sometime in July. (See above re: my new optimistic attitude.)

Anyway, this contact apparently stopped in to Beth's workplace yesterday to chat with her about how things are going. As they were talking, he apparently mentioned to her that they (my new employers) are afraid that they won't be able to hold on to me. Apparently, the fear is that I'm "too smart". The implication is that intelligent people need serious mental stimulation in order to stay satisfied in their jobs. Without said stimulation, I guess smart folks are supposed to get restless and feel the need for something more.

Note: I take this "too smart" comment as a great compliment. What I take away from it is that perhaps I comport myself in such a way as to not come across as a dolt. That's nice to know.

Well, the truth is that I have a pretty good sense of what keeps me happy. As far as work goes, it's largely a matter of (a) doing rather than delegating and (b) feeling as if I have actually done something at the end of the day — even if that something needs to be redone the next day. This job definitely satisfies both of those desires.

Beyond that, this new job provides me with lots of additional benefits. Among them:

• No longer spending all that time at work staring at a computer screen. (I've been doing that for over 15 years and I'm tired of it.)
• Getting some fresh air.
• Getting some exercise.
• Getting to see some pretty scenery.
• Having a schedule that allows me to see my darling wife for a significant portion of every day instead of basically having to live for the weekends.
  
• The satisfaction of knowing that I am part of the supply chain for ice cream — which I am convinced is the happiest food there is.
• The knowledge that my job simply can not be outsourced to China or India or Vietnam (which I understand is the new "hot" market for taking American jobs).

You might expect from my long and ever-growing list of New Year's Resolutions that I am the sort of person who likes to set goals for himself. This is simply not the case. I like to get through each day as it comes. Beyond that, my long term goals are pretty simple: 1) I want to spend a larger percentage of my time with Beth. 2) I hope to someday retire. That's pretty much it.

Shorter term goals tend to be merely steps along the way. And in a very real way, this new job will move me closer to both of those goals. The first is obvious, as I will soon no longer be on an opposite work schedule to Beth's. The second is a bit more abstract, but basically it boils down to this: For me, retirement is a situation that brings with it the idea of no longer exhausting my mental capacities as someone else's employee. Which brings me to my twenty-second New Year's Resolution of the year:

I resolve that if/when it becomes a reality, I will be filled with gratitude for something that may seem strange to others: The blessed opportunity to have serious thought be strictly a leisure activity.

I love to engage in serious thought. I always have interesting ideas kicking around my head, and they provide me with a great source of amusement. When my mental energy is assigned to someone else's priorities, this is more a drain than it is an inspiration. To my way of thinking, work should not be what we live for. Interesting thought, on the other hand, is not at all a bad thing to live for. If my mind were not capable of providing me with intellectual stimulation, then I might welcome an intellectually challenging work environment, just to keep me from going batty. I am thankful that I am not in such a situation. My mind does not seem at all in danger of leaving me in a state of endless boredom, thank you very much!

[And no, I am not suggesting that the new job allows me to simply show up and check out. It does require attention. It just doesn't require what might be termed "advanced thinking".]

02009 New Year's Resolution #20: Something About Turning the Self-Deprecation Down a Notch

I should probably make this New Year's Resolutions 20 through 23. There's so much here that it probably deserves to be counted as at least four separate Resolutions. However, I'm going to just combine it all into one big one, so as not to unreasonably inflate my count.

My great tragic secret (which I've never really kept secret at all) is that for the last 20 years I have thought of myself as ugly, stupid, boring, undeserving of praise, and generally unworthy of love. Think of Stuart Smalley's Daily Affirmations and turn them on their head. That's essentially been my internal monologue for the last two decades. [I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. And gosh darn it, there's no conceivable reason why people should like me.]

I am constantly astonished that my darling wife ever fell for me, let alone that every day she's still here, still in love with me. This I have never been able to comprehend. Why me?

Well, 20 years is probably enough.

Being so down on one's place in the world does, I think, tend to skew one's world view, probably in a not-so-healthy way. For one thing, it tends to stifle ambition. Besides that, it probably has some significant social consequences. (When one assumes that others would not want to befriend someone as lowly as I have considered myself to be, that probably becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Somehow, I have managed to make some wonderful friends over the years, but this was probably despite myself.)

My twentieth New Year's Resolution of 02009 involves trying to work on my attitude towards myself.

I resolve to...

• try to keep in mind that I am probably not always the ugliest guy in the room.


• try to remind myself that the IQ tests and SAT scores and school grades, while no guarantee, have been consistently high enough that "stupid" very likely does not truly apply.


• try to be encouraged (by the friends I have and by Beth's persistence in sticking around) that I may not be as boring as I have for so long believed. Perhaps there is something interesting about me after all.


• try to be less dismissive of compliments; try to accept them at face value as being sincere instead of questioning the motives behind them.

02009 New Year's Resolution #19: Be More Prepared

I was driving home today after visiting Beth on her lunch break, when suddenly I saw this bird flying out there ahead of me. It was a jet black bird with an alarming red spot. My first thought was "red winged black bird". I was then immediately and simultaneously struck by two adjustments: 1) Way too big! and 2) The red spot is in the wrong place.

Soon I realised that I was behind a spectacular woodpecker. The red spot was its head. Before I overtook it, it veered to the left and perched on the side of a tree. There was my confirmation: A gorgeous woodpecker, indeed!

Alas, I did not have my camera with me.

So, when I arrived home, I grabbed my tripod and my camera, which already had my longest lens on it, and I drove back out in hopes of getting a shot of the bird. I parked about 1/8 mile down the road and started walking back to where the bird had landed. The bird was gone, of course.

I stood around for a little while and listened for the telltale pecking. I heard it off in the woods, and I started heading in that general direction. But I soon realised that the sound was coming from farther away than I was really prepared to go. I stood there in the woods for a while, listening and observing, hoping that the bird might come closer. No luck there, but I did spot something in the woods that I thought would make an interesting composition. So I set up my tripod, focused the lens, turned the camera on and went to take the shot. It was then that I remembered that my battery was cradled in its charger, safely back at home. "Curses! Foiled again!"

Well, this leads to my nineteenth New Year's Resolution of 02009:

I resolve to try to be better prepared for spontaneity!

That's it. Pretty simple. Sorry if you were hoping for something more substantial.

In the meantime, here are a couple of recent photos. I've mostly been posting photos recently to Facebook. These have already appeared there. But I understand that not all of my readers are on Facebook, so I'm posting these for those. Enjoy!

02009 New Year's Resolution #18: Cogito Ergo Possum, But Accept That I Probably Won't

A longtime friend (who also recently said something that made me think that "longtime friend" is sometimes more politic than "old friend") recently reminded me of an idea that has been amusing me (in a low simmer sort of way) for the last couple of years: Cogito ergo possum.

I'm sure my dear readers are all familiar with Descartes' famous assertion: Cogito ergo sum. (I think; therefore I am.) Likewise, I'm sure that most of you are familiar with Watty Piper's The Little Engine Who Could, who famously asserted, "I think I can."

By mixing the two together, I came up with the following hybrid: Cogito ergo possum. [Note: I'm not fluent in Latin and I am not a qualified translator. But I managed to cobble this together, and I don't think it's ineptly worded.] The resulting phrase translates to: "I think; therefore I can."

Searching the internet, I quickly learned that I was not the first to devise the phrase. In fact, it has been cleverly and humorously translated as "I think; therefore I play dead." (Which I think is genius!) Turns out that Cogito ergo possum is also apparently the motto of Walt Kelly's Pogo.

(I haven't yet taken the time to seek evidence of this in the volumes of Pogo strips that are on the bookcase next to our front door. But I intend to. If I can find said evidence, I'll probably post a scan of the appropriate frame. Walt Kelly was a genius and it seems to me that if I can play some small part in spreading his gospel, that would be a noble act.)

Anyway, Cogito ergo possum is sort of a reasonable credo for my interior mental life. It suggests a kind of belief in the power of thought: If one can think it, then doing it becomes a mere matter of will overcoming sloth. If you accept this idea and embrace it, there comes a certain confidence in your capacity for achieving something important. That's a nice idea. Frankly, it's sort of intoxicating in its ego-boosting capacity.

The problem with me is that while I possess this knowledge and am confident in my own thought processes, I am extremely bad about actually translating the thought into action. That is, my sloth generally overcomes my will.

So I have lots of bright ideas kicking around in my head. But rarely do I make any real effort at turning them into anything tangible. My habit has long been to jealously guard my bright ideas and to keep them secret. This is a bad habit! But until very recently I had not really recognised what a bad habit it is.

This has something to do with intellectual property rights, which I am a big fan of. I like the idea that inventors should be able to profit from their inventions. I believe that theft of intellectual property is every bit as wrong as theft of physical property. However, I must admit that I am unlikely to ever get around to dealing with most of my bright ideas. If I won't see them to fruition, and if I also keep them all as secrets, not only do I not benefit from them but neither does anyone else. That's where the bad habit comes in.

If, for example, I am not ever going to perform the world's first meaningful time travel experiment (and surely I am not), is there some good reason why I shouldn't at least toss the experiment's design out there in case it might inspire someone else to actually perform the experiment? Of course not! There's really no benefit to myself or to anyone else or to society at large if I keep the experiment's design a secret. But if I set it free, there's some slight chance that someone less slothful than myself might take up the baton and run with it. Where's the harm in that?

So, having achieved this new wisdom, I hereby make my eighteenth New Year's Resolution of 02009:

I resolve to not be so senselessly protective of my bright ideas.

I will be less apt to keep them from public scrutiny, finally acknowledging that there is more value in the potential of inspiring others than there is in the smugness of knowing that I possess some special idea that could result in something really cool if only I would get around to acting on it.

I suppose this resolution is at least as much about honestly assessing my own sloth as it is about honestly assessing the brilliance of my best thoughts. Anyway, as with Cogito ergo possum, it generally turns out that my brightest ideas are not uniquely mine. Usually, someone else has already had the same thoughts (or similar enough to qualify). In such cases especially, there is a very compelling reason to add a reinforcing voice to the chorus rather than to keep it under my hat.

02009 New Year's Resolution #17: Support the Arts

I suppose in some sense, one could argue (if one were so inclined) that my photography constitutes a sort of ongoing art project. I would not.

Likewise, I suppose my monthly documenting of my hair's growth could be described as a sort of art project. I would not describe it so.

One might (as a stretch) claim that my t-shirt designs from last summer (none of which sold, sadly enough) could be considered a sort of an art project. Again, I would make no such claim.

Instead, I would assert that I haven't really made any efforts in terms of starting an art project in a very, very long time. This is sad, as I used to think I might try to make a profession of art. Pessimism, lack of self-confidence, laziness, the need to pay the bills...all of these things ended up putting the goal of producing something artistic on the back burner.

I intend to finally get around to changing that, at least a little. Presenting my seventeenth New Year's Resolution of 02009:

I resolve to undertake some sort of new art project.

I'll now describe my current dream project. [Note: I very much doubt that this is what I'll end up starting. Something tells me that it's more likely to be something much less involved, less ambitious, more modest. Perhaps a series of oil pastel or charcoal drawings.]

I would call this current dream project "The Domicile Project". I would like to either build or repurpose an old library card catalog. In it, I would catalog everything in our house, filing it all in alphabetical order, cross-referencing everything by country of origin, name, description, color, ingredients, etc. Each card would include the appropriate "home" location for the item described. So, by necessity, I would come up with a system which assigned a code to each shelf, each drawer, each cabinet, each room, etc. And that code would act as my personal Dewey Decimal System.

Each card would include a printed photograph of the item in question, but the description would be written by hand. Each card would have on its back a place for from and to addresses, and a rectangle for a postage stamp. Visitors to the installation (assuming someone would be willing to exhibit the project) would be encouraged to browse through the catalog and would further be encouraged to find a favorite card and take it with them as a souvenir, and also to take one to send as a postcard to a friend or loved one. The original hand written cards that had been removed would periodically be replaced by computer-printed facsimile cards (without the postcard formatting on the back). The facsimile cards would be somehow clearly marked as copies, with a watermark or a cancellation line through the face or perhaps a hole in the middle. Visitors would be discouraged from taking these, and encouraged instead to try to find a suitable original, until all such originals had been distributed.

And in case you're wondering, I am not obsessively well-organized. To some degree, I think just the opposite is true: that I am obsessively disorganized — at least as regards my personal stuff. But something about the potential for this exercise appeals very deeply to me. Perhaps it's a connection with the outmoded furniture. (I have recently come to understand that card catalogs are largely a thing of the past and that there's a whole generation of folks who don't know what they are.) Perhaps it's the alphabetization aspect. (While I am not organizationally minded, I am profoundly entranced by the invention of alphabetical order and its application.) Perhaps it's the idea of freezing a moment in time. (At some point, the cataloging would be complete. I expect that the final day of cataloging would necessarily involve going through the kitchen to document the perishables.)

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A general note on the nature of my New Year's Resolutions: In case this was unclear, and in case anyone was wondering, I think it's worth mentioning that I do not necessarily intend to perform all of my 02009 New Year's Resolutions during the calendar year of 02009. Instead, I intend to give myself one year from whatever date I make each resolution. If I end up making my last Resolution on December 31st, it would be unfair to expect it to be completed by midnight that night.

April Hair Photos

Happy April Fool's Day!

As you will recall from previous posts, my 02008 New Year's Resolution was to try my best to resist the urge to cut my hair, with the ultimate goal of donating it to Locks of Love.

With just one week left in the year, my resolve to keep my hair uncut was still intact. However, my attention was brought to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program, with its 8 inch requirement (which is better for me than Locks of Love's 10 inches). I am eager to get rid of the mess on my head. So, I switched allegiance.

Here are the April 1, 02009 photos:


I did end up getting a slight trim on Monday, after Beth told me that I had split ends. This may set me back a bit, but not as much as I expected. I think I may still be on pace for a May or June shearing. I'm really looking forward to it.

02009 New Year's Resolutions #15 and #16: Write Nicely and Write Nicely

My handwriting is terrible. I know this. I have known it for a very long time. IN FACT, I USUALLY WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS IN AN EFFORT TO INCREASE LEGIBILITY. But as anyone who knows about typography will happily tell you, legibility is actually increased by not using ALL CAPS. This is because with ALL CAPS the words tend not to have a very distinctive shape. Lowercase letters have tall parts and short parts and parts that dip below the baseline, which tends to give words distinctive shapes. I almost never use cursive. So rarely, in fact that it feels completely unnatural.

Here's my fifteenth New Year's Resolution of 02009:

I resolve to try to improve my handwriting.

I am increasingly impressed with decent handwriting. This is particularly true of lovely cursive. My mother's handwriting is terrific. And the lady who writes out the appointment cards at my doctor's office has really beautiful cursive. Beth's handwriting is vastly better than my own, and I am a bit jealous. So I'm going to try to improve my handwriting over the course of the next year. Beth tells me that this won't work. She thinks my handwriting is fixed, beyond my control. We shall see. I don't hold out much hope for success, but I choose to go into this with uncharacteristic optimism.

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My sixteenth New Year's Resolution of 02009 is somewhat related, at least inasmuch as it will provide me with an opportunity to work on my handwriting:

I resolve to start writing letters again.

Long ago, I used to write letters. Pretty regularly, in fact. I wrote these great rambling things, sometimes 20 pages or more, to dear friends — to people who then meant the world to me and, frankly, all these years later, still do. Somewhere along the way, I simply stopped doing such. I miss it (and I have gotten a report from one such friend that she misses my letters, which is encouraging). Although the simple truth is that it's been so long that I'm not altogether sure what really went into a lot of those letters, so it's entirely possible that my new letters will be entirely different in both tone and content from what my old letters were. So what?!?

Honestly, given that we're all in such a rush and all so overburdened with "responsibilities" nowadays, isn't it the thought that counts? And what better expression of thought than taking/making the time to commit words to paper, with a specifically targeted audience of one (with no expectation/intention of having anyone else ever read those words, and with no capacity to cut-and-paste the contents to be repurposed into some other document), using a time-consuming and hand-cramping technique?

There's something very intimate and personal about sitting down and writing a letter longhand that is just not matched by typing an e-mail. I miss that. And while I greatly appreciate a good e-mail from an old friend, I do also miss receiving actual letters in the mail. I think sending letters tends to encourage getting letters. So while the blame is wholly mine for discontinuing my own writing of letters, I think it's also fair to say that I am somewhat to blame for the fact that somewhere along the line I also stopped receiving letters.

I'm going to try to break the cycle, at least a little. I'm not setting any real goals for myself. I don't necessarily intend to resume letter-writing correspondence with everyone who I used to write to. I'm not aiming to write, for example, twelve letters in the next twelve months. I'm just aiming to start.

If I manage two real letters in the next year [personal letters (not business), hand-written (not typed), on sheets of paper (not crammed into the confines of a birthday card or holiday card)], I believe that will be more than I have accomplished in the last several years combined. The last real letter I can recall writing was probably in 01998, to an old friend, who (as a result of that letter) figured out before I did that Beth and I should end up as more than just friends.

Note: Do not infer from my mentioning of "two real letters" that I intend to write two and call it a day. I don't. I really want to make letter writing a habit, as it once was. But I do at least have in mind my first two intended recipients. So I'm ready to get going. All I need now is the spark of inspiration, and some time to get rolling.

A New Photograph

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year involves trying to produce five photographs that fill me with unjustifiable pride. Here's my first. I shot this on Thursday.

I rarely title my photographs, but in this case I've made an exception. The title of the photograph: Concerning the Transience of Rainbows.

The rainbows reference has to do with the two arched trees that are central in the image. I don't know why, but up here in New Hampshire there are lots of these thin trees that have bent over into beautiful arcs. I noticed this particular pair a while ago. On Thursday I decided to trek out into the snow and shoot them from the opposite direction. I love how they parallel each other.

I'm truly proud of this shot, so that's 1/5 of the way to fulfilling this particular resolution.