Feelin' Wimpy

Wimpy /ˈwɪmpi/.

1. n. Nickname for a character from the Popeye cartoon strip whose full name is J. Wellington Wimpy. Of this character, Wikipedia states, "Wimpy is very intelligent, and well educated, [OK, I like where this is going. . . .] but very lazy and gluttonous." Hmmmm.

Well, I have to admit that I do enjoy a good hamburger, for which I would gladly pay you Tuesday. And the mustache fits. The hair is getting closer all the time. I guess this is your call, gentle reader.

2. adj. Not Hefty, Hefty, Hefty. Also not Hefty, Hefty. Not Hefty. Not even hefty. At all.



As in, "wimpy, wimpy, wimpy." Falling apart. No holding power. Bottom drops out. Weak. Having holes.


Yeah, that seems vaguely descriptive as well.

3. adj. Puny. Weak. Easily tired. Lacking ability to get going when the going gets tough. Without grit, fortitude, or guts. Unable to resist the Call of the Laz-E-Boy. Just about empty by 3 p.m.


Yeah! That's IT! That's me, almost three weeks after my operation. Even those last two exclamation marks have pretty much exhausted me. No more bold face or italics for the rest of the blog.

I'm still eleven days away from my official surgical follow-up and the sanction to lift things heavier than a gallon of milk (8.6 lbs for whole milk, more for skim). That should probably clue me in to the fact that maybe I'm not supposed to feel back to normal yet, but somehow I'm always surprised at how wimpy I feel each afternoon. And evening.

The good news is, I can sleep. In a bed. On either side, or my back, or my stomach. None of the pain I used to have. I guess I can live with a couple more weeks of puniness for such a gift.

PS. For those of you who were thinking that "hefty" still describes me pretty well, Thanks A Lot. Kick a man while he's down, why dontcha?

Yes, But Is It Art?

I suppose quite a few parents have "But when I came home from work and opened the door, my children had..." stories. Thankfully, mine are not too catastrophic. But occasionally I do come home to find something a little different sitting on the end table by the front door:

When this happens, it is never in question what has transpired: Em has been on a walk somewhere and found more treasure.

And more treasure.

And more treasure.


And one of my personal favorites, here shown with a dime in order to illustrate relative size:



Now, the astute reader will be asking her/himself, "But what does she do with all her treasure?" I'm so glad you asked.

She attaches it to the wall of her bedroom:



And, if she's really lucky, and stumbles across a pile of rusty old metal out in the desert, she uses it to make a mobile:

The finished product:

(In the background is the sun-figure what was handed to me by a nice man on the streets of St. Louis one evening while I was walking to a restaurant; but that's another blog post. Maybe.)


I'm still waiting to see what these turn into:

(We had to stop the car and wait so she could go get these.)

But I do take some comfort in knowing where she will be in another 10 years: living in New York, or San Francisco, or Seattle, in a little house with an attached studio, working in -- well, some medium or another:

It brings a little tear to my eye.

Toot Toot, Hey, Beep Beep

I admit that musically, I am stuck in the past. I came of age in the 70's, and so did my musical tastes (and maybe even the 60's, as I frantically tried to figure out what I had missed -- the Sixties came to Emery County quite late). So yeah, people have some fun with the songs I listen to as well as those that spontaneously appear in my brain and come out in hummed snippets during the day.

I was proud when my daughter learned to play Bad Moon Rising, Knocking on Heaven's Door, Born to be Wild, and Smoke on the Water in her guitar class. And I was gleeful when my son discovered I Am the Walrus. (We both agree it doesn't get much better than "Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye.") Every now and then, I can dismiss something my children are listening to by a wave of the hand and "Bah! That's just a cover of the real version!" And occasionally I have to admit that some of my music is silly, and less frequently I have to admit that I kind of like something they listen to (They Might be Giants, for example, or Mika. Of course, both of them are silly, too). So go the battles and truces of the Culture Wars in my family.

By now the astute reader will have discerned the real Achilles' Heel in my position, and that is Disco. As I was living through the Disco Era, I thought it likely represented the Beginning of the End of All Things. I didn't set foot into a disco until once in 1982, and haven't since. To me, the Bee Gees were the artistic equivalent of the Three Stooges. Donna Summer was a musical Mata Hari. I had to agree with the cast of Doonesbury when, in late 1979 they held an "End of Decade" party, and Mark Slackmeyer proposed a toast to "A Kidney Stone of a Decade." Disco had almost made me forget that the mid-seventies had brought me "Band on the Run" and "Benny and the Jets." I just wanted Disco out of my musical life.

Of course, I tried not to listen to it. I had my music at home but was still years away from having a car cassette player. And I was in college. I wasn't about to drive without music. So like it or not, it was there in the background, a soundtrack to my Bachelor's Degree: Alicia Bridges wanting some "Ack-shaaawn" mixing in with Zorn's Lemma. Can't be healthy. And as it turns out, it wasn't.

Now, years later, thanks to online music services like Rhapsody and iTunes Music Store, I have been able to deplete my children's college funds by buying up music from the 60's and 70's (OK, and a few from the early 80's). Sometimes I remember a song and go looking for it; other times I vaguely remember the name and need to listen to it; if I like it, I buy it. The problem is, I'm finding that I can listen to some of the disco songs from that era and like them. I've even spent good money on a few. These are songs I wouldn't have walked across the street to spit on in 1980. But today, they sound pretty good. Boy, do I feel like a sheep.

It was the radio, you see. Repetition and familiarity break down your natural defenses until your brain mistakes liking something for being familiar with it. It's like the first time you taste beer. It's bitter and nasty. The second time, too. But taste by taste, you get used to it. And then you like it. And then you're in trouble. I'm living proof that revulsion can become reverence through repetition (with disco, not beer. Honest). You can use that alliterative "revulsion-reverence-repetition" phrase in Sunday School lessons if you want, but please send me a nickel each time you do.

So people; if something is nasty, don't try it again. It will only lead to heartache. The second time you watch "Dancing with the Stars," your head won't hurt quite as much. Midway through the season, you'll start thinking that "According to Jim" is really funny. Just Say No.

PS. Don't inhale, either.

The Problem with Math: Problems

I am a math teacher, and it quite frankly amazes me that my life insurance rates are not prohibitively high because of it.

Periodically, I tutor young men and women in my neighborhood. Often they are having some trouble because they missed a few days of math clas, or maybe they just don’t quite understand their teacher as well as they’d like. So they come to me, and we do some problems together at my kitchen table.

I get angry. Not at the kids; they are generally doing the best they can with whatever they have been given. But I get angry at the problems they are assigned. And I figure if I, as a math teacher – as someone who is not afraid of sentences that begin, “Let H be a compact Hausdorff space. . . .,” as someone who periodically integrates secant cubed just to see if I still “got it” – if I get angry, what chance do the kids possibly have?

See, it isn’t ever enough to teach a concept, then see if kids can apply that concept. No. We have to teach several concepts, then make horrible examples in which they all apply at once. And throw in some ugly fractions at the same time. I’ll give you an example of what I mean:

Problem: Graph y = 7 + sin x.
Student: “No problem; that 7 just moves the graph up 7 units.” (Hums happily while sketching graph)



Problem: Graph y = 3sin x.
Student: “Easy. That 3 just stretches the graph 3 up and 3 down. I can do that.” (More happy humming)

Problem: Graph y = cos 4x.
Student: “OK, I know that 4 makes the period – uh, longer? Shorter? Let’s see. Oh, yeah, I divide the period 2 pi by that 4, and the new period is pi over 2, and so I just scruntch it all into pi over 2 instead of 2 pi.” (Proceeds to sketch graph. No humming this time.)

Problem: Graph y+7/3 = 5/2 tan (3x + 7/4).
Student: “Mr. Math Teacher, sir? Please come over here so I can beat you up.”

See? Anger. Anger is a perfectly rational reaction to that. Admit it. You wouldn’t take that kind of abuse from anyone, let alone some old guy who talks through his nose and is half covered with chalk dust. So why do we expect kids to take it?



Sigh. Good thing nobody reads this blog, or I’d have a lot of angry math teachers to deal with.

Channeling Carnac the Magnificent

I take the hermetically sealed envelope out of the mayonnaise jar, and holding it to my ornately turbaned head, I say:

"A camel with one too many straws, a movie with two gay cowboys, and me."

Tearing open the envelope, I reveal the question:

"Name three things with a broke back."

Yeah, apparently I have a stress fracture in one of my vertebrae. Which would explain some of the back pain. Maybe not all, but some.

Why do I have a stress fracture? I don't know. Honestly, I have no idea how it happened. No recollection of anything that could have done it. I'd like to think that it came from my performing some superhuman feat of strength, like lifting a bus off of an orphan. But no. More likely it was because I have the bones of a 70-year-0ld woman. I was going to sell them on Ebay, but they wouldn't let me (rimshot).

So it looks like maybe there will be less Diet Coke, more weight-bearing exercise, and more calcium-rich foods in my future. It figures. My doctor visits have this nasty habit of returning to the theme of exercising more, eating better, and getting more sleep. Perhaps I'll try it this time.

The Williams Way

I saw my cousin at the hardware store today. He lives about two hours away, and we see each other maybe once a year, at the family reunion. And of course, because we are roughly the same age and on good terms, we always exchange a few words -- maybe twelve. Let me count: "Hi, Tom, how you doin'?" "Fine. How are you guys doin'?" "Fine."

Yup, twelve.

Actually, our conversation at the hardware store was rather involved, by comparison, ranging over such topics as what project I was doing that brought me to the hardware store ("Oh, just fixing some stuff") and how Tom's parents, my aunt and uncle, were doing ("Real good."). I didn't ask him what brought him to the hardware store two hours from his home. If he wanted me to know, he'd have told me. But overall, it was really pretty chatty by our usual standards.

I think both of us are kind of relieved that we've pretty much taken care of our social obligations for the year. I figure this June, at the family reunion, we'll probably just nod at each other as we pass by. Don't want to overdo it. Besides, we both know how we'll be doin': Fine. We'll be doin' just fine.

And that's all a Williams really needs to know.

Erynn and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day(s)

Just over a week ago, Erynn had a very very good day. She has been taking ballroom dance as an after-school class this year, and has therefore been dancing with the Dixon Middle School ballroom dancers at various concerts this year. Last week, the two Dixon teams went to a competition involving several local middle schools. Long story short, Dixon walked away with two gold ribbons and the trophy for overall best dancers. Erynn was justifiably happy and proud. I was originally planning to write a blog complaining about how everything needs to be made into a competition in our society. But I figured since my daughter's team won, I'd let it slide.

HA! In your face, Other Local Middle Schools!

Anyway, she's had a good week. And then, yesterday, the Dixon team had one dance at a Provo High School dance concert. As I found out later, Erynn (as she says), "biffed it" as she was walking into the school just before the concert. Scraped and bruised both knees and both elbows. Must have been quite a biff. It included a face plant, so that her upper lip came between her braces and the sidewalk, resulting in blood and puffiness.

Trooper that she is, she bandaged up and got ready to dance. And dance she did. We didn't know any of this, sitting in the audience, videotaping our daughter's one performance, which as near as we could tell went well. However, if you examined closely the videotape, you would be able to find, as we did later, the exact moment when her dress fell off, and she was scooting to the back of the stage in her black undies, there in front of God and everybody.



As spectators, we honestly didn't notice it at the time. I'm not sure if anyone did, really. Except, of course, Erynn and her fellow sufferers up on stage. But it's there, on tape. It brought a smile to our faces last night as we watched it. In fact, it brought loud guffaws and snorts of laughter. Erynn wasn't convinced it was that funny.

She managed to get her dress fixed in the intervening 15 seconds or so, while the dancers were in two lines (her in the back, thankfully enough), doing hand jives. And the rest of the dance went off without any major wardrobe malfunctions.

As if that wasn't bad enough, the luck continued to today, which, of course, is Mother's Day. Erynn spent her last package of -- well, it's some kind of crafty plaster-like substance -- in making a pretty heart-shaped present for her Mom. And when she was working on it, she picked it up to move it and it broke. Likely beyond redemption.

Sad indeed. But the saddest thing is what she said to me last night, as we contemplated the dance debacle. She said, "Well, I guess it was just getting back at me for being so happy last week." If you're not quite sure what "it" was, then you probably haven't spent your life convinced that "it" was keeping score, and trying not to be too obviously happy or worry-free, because you knew beyond doubt that "it" would pay you back if you were. I have spent my life that way, so I recognized the symptoms immediately. It's part of my family heritage. I got it from my dad, who gotit from his mom, and on back, somewhere into Denmark, which gave us, after all, Hamlet, and goodness knows he knew better than to get too happy. I'm not sure, but I think "it" lives somewhere near Copenhagen.


Anyway, I have a few words of advice to give my daughter: You don't have to be another dismal Dane. First, you have every right to be happy when good things happen. Second, nobody is keeping score but you. Third, if you don't believe what I just told you, then start right now to fight that feeling. Fight it for all you're worth. It might be too late for me, but you can still save yourself.