experience proof fifteen bored? contact

Reveille

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:11:08 -0700

[Author’s note: I’m cheating. Plagiarized this from ye olde family blog, because (a) it makes me chuckle, (b) I’m overdue to add to this here fifteen blog, and (c) for reasons that will soon become clear, I’m a little sleepy today.]
It is 5:33 in the morning. Five. Thirty. Three. For those of you (bizarre) early riser types, this might not seem odd. For a Carlson, it is unreasonably, almost incomprehensibly early. I am lost in the warm, softly rolling embrace of blissfully deep sleep, right down to the drool on the pillow and, presumably, the flutter in my eyelids. I awake with a start, only to discover myself alone in bed. This isn't necessarily alarming—yet. Pregnant ladies, bless their hearts, excuse themselves often during the night.
Through a dreadfully taxing effort of will, I crack a solitary eyelid and pluck out an earplug. The house is still dark, and pin-drop quiet, but nonetheless an icy cold fear grips my heart. The mildly encouraging silence continues for another two seconds...three...four...as my wife tiptoes toward the bathroom.
And then, at first whimpering and then outright fussing, "Mama! I want a binkie!"
I am crestfallen. In a disconcertingly ongoing assault on history, this is yet another post-infancy early rise-and-shine record broken. A single, softly whispered, deeply heartfelt F-bomb escapes my lips as I start doing the math on how many hours' sleep we've managed and just how badly my daily productivity will be impacted. It doesn't look good. Meanwhile, my wife has retrieved the whining mass of bed-head, sleep sack and jammies, and deposited him in the middle of our bed, eyes and pacifier darting about wildly.
Furtively, naively and unspoken, both parents entertain thoughts of, "Maybe, this time, he'll drift back to sleep." Instead, infuriatingly and inevitably, the next 90 minutes are spent with my son alternately chatting, yanking on Mama’s hair, kicking me not-softly in the ribs and occasionally teasing us with the specter of a sleeping toddler, only to giggle or some-such whenever the covers are even slightly disturbed. For the entirety of this process, I grapple with an ongoing inner monologue along the lines of, "You are the adult. He is the child. Take a deep breath. He doesn't know any better," while fighting the temptation to usher forth with a profanity-laced tirade about the virtues of sleeping the eff in, at least until the sun is up.
Eventually, I calmly rise from the bed, pull on some sweats and slip quietly out of the room. Which is to say, I fire off a frustrated sigh that could be heard in the balcony seats, kick off the covers as if I've just discovered some insectile infestation at my feet and storm out of the room to knock stuff around the kitchen dramatically. I've rarely gotten ready for work and out the door so quickly, more or less the entire time gritting my teeth and struggling to keep it together while Captain Crankypants screams, kicks, flails and occasionally snuggles with Mama, marveling all along at the fact I can scarcely remain calm for 45 minutes, while my wife will spend the entire day with this hot, fussy mess. She is a saint.
Anyone who tells you every moment of parenthood is a joy is either lying, or a much, much better person than me.

Holding Down Your Corner of the Sandbox

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:54:15 -0700

Back in the days when I worked in corporate America—at a financial services organization, so we’re talking, like, corporate corporate—I had an admittedly strange affinity for employee training and development courses.
Specifically, I really enjoyed the “here’s how people think” classes. Myers & Briggs, TDF International, that type of thing. While fussing with the crease in my chinos, folding up the cuffs of my royal blue button-down shirt and ensuring my employee badge was properly displayed on its lanyard, I got a kick out of learning more about what makes people tick.
One concept in particular stuck with me: The notion that it’s easy to sell yourself short by not valuing and fully appreciating the skills that come naturally to you, yet at the same time become frustrated by coworkers who might lack those same skills (in lieu of other talents).
One instructor (an HR professional and natural public speaker) talked about what it’d look like if she and her husband (a sharp but at times prickly IT programmer) switched jobs. They were both talented, smart, working adults who could likely, in the most literal sense, accomplish the tasks associated with each other’s jobs. They’d also both be exhausted and cranky by the end of the day.
I sometimes think about this when I fire up ye olde laptop at my office in the morning. Honestly, there are days I feel as if I’m getting away with something. At its most rudimentary level, my gig is simply to arrange words in a pleasant order, yet a wide-ranging stable of seemingly savvy clients pay me a reasonably comfortable living to do so. I like what I do, it truthfully doesn’t often feel like work, and the mailbox money continues its steady, debt collector-dissuading march to our door. Why don’t more people do this?
And then I have these little moments, when I force myself to acknowledge that my proclivity for language just might be a helpful differentiator, and rest a little easier. One such moment occurred earlier today, in the following client response to an email I’d sent:
“‘Cessation?’ You are really going to drop ‘cessation’ on a bunch of idiots who work in marketing?
...I will admit though, at times I want to spell every word wrong to make you angry/hide the fact I don't know how to spell or use grammar.”
Times like this, I simply chuckle, back up my hard drive and clock out for the day, reasonably confident I’ve just been called a five-star communications pro, and not an insufferable prig.

Footprints in the Sand

Wed, 2 Feb 2011 08:12:10 -0800

The boy squints into the sunlit mist and packs another bucketful of sand into place. How long had it been since Trixie chased the seagull down the breakers and out of sight? He wasn’t sure. Four years of life had given him many talents, but the ability to tell time was not among them.
Listening to the waves crash, feeling the salty spray on his cheeks, he turns and looks over his shoulder at Mama. There she is, lying still on the blanket, hat low over her sunglasses. It looks like she might be sleeping.
Swiveling his gaze once again down the line of surf and toward Haystack Rock, he struggles to spot his dog among the many people and pets milling around. He’s starting to get nervous. She’s been gone too long.
“Trixie…?” he calls out hesitantly, his feeble little-boy voice instantly drowned out by the pounding of the sea and the whip of the wind.
“Mmmmphmll,” comes the sleepy reply from Mama’s blanket.
Still no sign of her. The little flutter in his tummy is fast becoming an almost overwhelming fear of loss. What to do? What to do? He doesn’t want to wake Mama up; Mama had a headache. She also told him to stay where he could see her, but that was before Trixie ran away. Mama would understand, right?
He makes his decision. Standing up abruptly and tottering on the verge of collapse before suddenly regaining his balance, in that timelessly endearing way only toddlers can, he swats the sand from his knees. He tries in vain to spot Trixie in the hazy distance, sneaks one last fleeting glance over his shoulder at Mama, and takes first one tentative step, then another, and another still, until he finds himself walking alone down the zig-zaggy line between wet and dry sand.
If he looks back, he’ll see his mother still sleeping soundly. If she awakes at this moment, she’ll see her boy’s slender frame becoming smaller and smaller as his little feet continue to move one in front of the other. She does not.
He’s filled with a sense equal parts fear and exhilaration, and the boy’s steps become faster and more ragged as he begins to shout “Trixie! Here, girl!” at the top of his lungs. Some adult heads turn, but there are many children and dogs around, and most think nothing of it. Trixie is still nowhere to be found as the roar of the crashing waves fills his mind. He’s running now, barely visible from the site of his abandoned sandcastle.
* * *
From the other direction down the beach, a happy, wet sand-covered little white dog comes bounding back to his owner’s warm blanket in the sun, soggy tennis ball clenched merrily in her teeth. A castle turret explodes in a plume of sand and canine claws as she passes by. Glancing furtively in the direction of where the boy should have been, her wagging tail pauses ever so briefly in its orbit. She trots over to the sleeping woman and drops the tennis ball unceremoniously on her master’s toes.
“Wha…oh. Hey, Trixie. Good girl. You having fun? Go give the ball to Harry, girl. Harry, sweetie, you want to…”
Sitting up now, she sees the suddenly giant-looking expanse of empty sand where her son should be. She is wide awake, fighting terror and swallowing panic. The imprints of his little feet lead off into the unknowable distance, steadily disappearing in the wind-driven sand.
“Harry!” she shouts in that direction. “HARRY!”

Clocking Out

Wed, 8 Dec 2010 11:35:32 -0800

For a host of reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality lately. This is not a terribly original thought, but: The one thing we all have in common, other than a mother, is that we die, and yet no one—in our Western culture, at least—seems terribly comfortable talking about it.
Maybe it’s having officially exited my 20s, maybe it’s being the father of a toddler and the primary financial provider for my fledgling family, or maybe it’s having a close family member, and another good friend, battling some pretty scary illnesses at the moment, but I can’t seem to shake the Grim Reaper theme lately when my mind wanders.
Being a writer, or perhaps simply being slightly off in the head, I tend to have an overactive imagination. I envision, in alarming detail, the bridge we’re driving across simply collapsing, Roland Emmerich-style, into the frigid waters below. While occasionally taking the Bainbridge Island ferry into Seattle, I try to suppress the image of my toddler splashing into the Puget Sound while the boat slips away, and then try to loosen my two-handed, bruise-inducing grip on his thighs while walking the deck. Watching the wings of a plane flex and bow in the jet stream, my brain says “necessary and unassailably safe design” while my heart whispers “what if the damn thing just snapped off?” as I order another Bloody Mary.
This may well mark me as having a screw loose, and as a fool for sharing said screw with the Internet, but I don’t think so. (Well, not the first part, at least.) Seems to me we all have these morbid thoughts from time to time—few are those who go through any considerable span of life without encountering, at least peripherally, some experience with death. Further, I’ve talked to more than one parent who’s confessed to involuntarily picturing similar doomsday fates for their progeny. (I figure it’s likely an ingrained component of human evolution, like considering the reality of a saber-toothed tiger devouring your little cave-baby prompted you to keep her closer to the fire or something.)
Not surprisingly, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, only that I’ve had death, everyone’s commonality in that fate, and our corresponding too-hard-to-think-about denial, on my brain. I wonder about how it feels, and what you consider, when the time finally comes to stare that ole scythe-totin’ SOB in the eye. I think we all like to believe we’ll be noble, and brave, and articulate, and say everything that needs to be said before we go gently into that good night. But the truth is, not everyone gets that opportunity. Or knows what to do with it if they do.
It seems to me that in the end, pardon the pun, there’s a certain peace in knowing everybody dies. I mean, sure, watch what you eat, get your ass up off the couch every so often, look both ways before crossing the street, and let the people you love know that you love them, early and often. But when your time’s up, your time’s up. What the hell? Relax.
So I turn up the car radio and sing along while crossing the bridge, loosen my vise-grip on my son’s legs, and fire down a few more swallows of airplane cocktail. But I won’t lie—I still scope out the people seated in the emergency rows, looking for the most able-bodied and cool-under-pressure-looking one in the lot.

104 Days

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:20:59 -0800

Being a writer whose noggin is typically full-up with parts of speech, (hopefully) pithy turns of phrase and adverbs and adjectives ad nauseum—okay, no more cutesy stuff for today—I tend to arrive home at the end of the day feeling like there’s not much room left in my brain for day-to-day details. You know, inconsequential stuff like paying the mortgage, taking the dog to the vet and remembering my anniversary.
As such, I’m big on prioritized list-making. Capture it somewhere outside my head before it gets bumped from the lineup by a new tagline idea or direct mail concept. Pretty much any task I need to complete in order to function as a reasonably productive adult is written down on a complex system of MacBook Dashboard widget virtual sticky notes and Google Calendar. My wife will be the first to tell you, if it’s not in one of those two places, forget about it. No matter how many times I’ve been reminded, I may as well be Guy Pearce in Memento.
Nowadays, running my own successful-if-I-do-say-so-myself business, the work-related priorities, in order of import, are pretty much (1) keep the money coming in the door, (2) keep from getting complacent on the business development front, and (3) keep on top of all the little things that technically aren’t essential, but make you look good—snazzy business cards, a tidy and well-decorated office space, and a company website that Google’s algorithms remain fond of.
The last bit is just so damned esoteric, though. When I’m busy earning a living writing words, the whole “write words for free on your blog” piece tends to slide down, and down, and down the list. I suppose the good news is that, the more neglected my website appears, the busier its author. But man, my mind was fairly well blown when some routine housekeeping earlier this morning revealed it’d been no less than 104 days since my last entry, a span of time that included, in chronological order:
• A nine-day, camping and client-visiting road trip to the Bay Area,
• A long weekend at the Oregon Coast to race garden slugs (don’t ask),
• My wedding anniversary (I remembered!),
• Another long weekend in Central Oregon,
• Several trips to the Puget Sound to visit my wife’s friends and family,
• My beloved Oregon Ducks (season ticket holder, thanks) going 10-0 and controlling their destiny to the national title game,
• Approximately 183 client meetings, and
• Yet another season-ending injury to Greg Oden (I now, heartbroken, officially give up).
Yet not, apparently, 15 free minutes to crank out a blog entry. (In actuality, pressing action items like “feet cold; buy SmartWool socks” and “low on Maker’s Mark” tend to jump it in the rankings like TCU after a close win.) I think my Google Analytics account is starting to worry I’m planning a breakup, and suspect it might have started seeing other websites.
I like to think I have legions of loyal readers (hi, Mom!), but it’s not like my In Box has been blowing up with copy-starved fans voicing their displeasure with my long dry spells. Not a single client has cut me loose because I’m not keeping my online house in order. So I should probably relax. But all I ever promised with this thing is 15 solid minutes of look-behind-the-curtain stream of consciousness, so here you go.
And besides—my time is up.