Laziness

I'm sure I was the source of much frustration for my parents. Beyond being a total spazzoid, I was an extremely lazy child. I would try to do as little as possible, and probably wasn't a very helpful kid. 

I remember when I was in 7th or 8th grade I had to mow the lawn each week. Our backyard had two wide beds with narrow strips of grass behind them. I was so lazy that I realized I could skip mowing the grass behind the beds and no one would notice. Of course eventually my dad did notice, and he wasn't happy with how I had half-assed my job, and warned me about half-assing life. But whenever I mowed the lawn I was always thinking about how to make that unenjoyable chore a bit easier or faster. I'd be listening to my walkman and thinking about the optimal mowing pattern to reduce the time lost to turns.

In many ways that sort of thinking is what led me to become an industrial engineer, where I could work to make processes more efficient reduce waste. Industrial engineering is really engineering for lazy people. It taught me that if the objective is to look out of your house on a nicely trimmed yard, that mowing behind those beds wasn't value added, but rather was waste that could be removed from the process.

My laziness has followed me into adulthood, but I noticed - especially once I started having things I cared about - that there is a certain pride of going the extra mile or doing the little things that only I would ever notice and I do them in spite of my laziness. 

Now this laziness does come with a few downsides. First, being lazy takes a tremendous amount of effort. Having to spend 10 minutes contemplating which route would be most efficient to run my errands far outweighs the time savings. Second, it's hard to achieve greatness in this life without putting in hard work. But what is greatness, and what makes it so great? The more I see of it, having a powerful career, or a bunch of money isn't always as great as it seems. 

I'd like to think I've stumbled on a system of optimized laziness. I've learned to pick the things that I really care about like being a good dad and building chicken coops and give my best effort on those. But when it comes to wrapping gifts, I'm as lazy as they come, and I will half-ass that job every Christmas Eve. Before having kids, my career was a bigger part of my identity. But I've come to realize that having a bigger job just comes with more stress and more work that's not always worth the ego boost or additional pay. I've found my way into a job that optimizes my effort:pay ratio. I could work twice as hard to make 20% more money, but that's not optimized laziness. 

Laziness has been a big driver in my life, but honestly, it's turned out pretty good. I might never be on the cover of a magazine, but I'm happy to float through life taking the easy route wherever possible. It's not a terrible way to live.

The best prank I've pulled

Yesterday I was driving my kids around in my wife's car. Her car is older so I get to enjoy the radio, and as I was driving a little ditty called I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner came on. I was immediately reminded of a great prank I pulled.

You might want to go ahead and play it while you read the rest. It'll only make things better.

Back in our college house we played a lot of Age of Empires. Many an hour were spent LANing, and AOE has been mentioned on the blog several times. The great thing about AOE was that there were taunts that you could type into the chat that would play a short audio snippet. Some of the bests were "I NEED WOOD" and "WOOLOLO". I eventually discovered that these taunts were just saved in the game files as MP3 with a naming convention corresponding to the number you entered into the chat. This spawned a great idea for a fun prank.

Over the next week or so, whenever a roommate's computer was unattended I would quickly and quietly plug in a flash drive and save the MP3 of Foreigner's I Want To Know What Love Is in their taunts folder. Once everything was set up I wanted until a game where I was winning big and as I went into my final death blow assault I hit the magic numbers, and a cascade of opening notes of one of the best power ballads of all time start playing through everyone's speakers over the sounds of me slaughtering their armies and townspeople. The combination of that 5 minute slow jam and being in their base killing their dudes was such a hilarious paring that I laugh just writing about it.

From that day on, I Want To Know What Love Is was played every time someone was about to win a game of AOE. The best thing is that you could have multiple iterations of I Want To Know What Love Is playing at the same time, so during some games there would be 4 or more I Want To Know What Love Is's playing. Now that's gaming!

Saying Goodbye to my Childhood Home

My parents sold my childhood home and moved to North Carolina. Granted, they've been talking about moving to the mid-south or Carolinas for about 10 years. And for the past year they've been building a house in Charlotte to move into. So I've had time to process this, but still, they've gone and sold my childhood home. The bastards.

This is the only home I've ever known, having lived there from the age of 1 to 18, and then coming home to visit for the next 17 years.  This is the place where all my childhood memories are most associated. Where countless hours were spent, tears shed, grasshoppers captured and sleepovers held. Every Christmas morning for 25 years was at that house. And now some stranger lives in it.

It's now a house I can only drive by and view from the outside. Never again will I enter her warm bosom of nostalgia and be reminded of the joy and agony that accompanies childhood. Frankly, I'm not sure I ever will drive by. My parents moving likely means I will have no reason to visit my hometown. Why would I go, and if I did, I'd have no place to stay. My youth is now a fleeting memory, and I, a middle aged man.

My parents however seem to have no qualms about departing the house they have inhabited for the past 35 years. Perhaps they've spent the past 10 years processing the impending change. They bemoan the loss of good friends, but friends are always transitory. How can they not grieve a house they have nurtured, and the memories contained within?

As a child I was always in awe of my grandfathers house. It was built immediately after the civil war. A stately home built for a county judge with 10 foot ceilings, a large porch and a sun-room. My grandfather lived there for 50 years, and my uncle has lived there for 25 more. But someday that house, a house that is the centerpiece of my father's family, will pass on to a new family. I've thought about this a lot over the past 20 years, and for some reason it always saddens me. Even though I was just a visitor, it's the place where most of the memories of my grandparents are tied to.

I wish I knew why I (and I suppose most people) tie so many memories to the physical houses. I certainly still hold an emotional attachment to our house in San Diego where we lived, even if only for 7 years. Perhaps it's because we put so much work into fixing up that house, perhaps because that's a house where our family sprouted, perhaps it's the pride of the first house I owned and cared for. I really don't know, but the song The Old Apartment by BNL always hits me in the feels.

I'm excited for my parents new chapter. I always knew my childhood home wouldn't be there for me to visit forever. I think knowing that it's gone is just the close of a chapter in my own life that I wasn't quite prepared to have end.

The end of a fun tradition

I'm a little late posting my annual chart of the birthday messages I receive, which I've been doing annually for 13 years now. You may have noticed that in the past two years the posts have gotten a bit shorter, and I've stopped adding in new things to track. I think the novelty has worn off, and the humor that I derive so much self worth from the number of people that wish me happy birthday has been completely played out. I've also pretty much stopped using facebook, and one of the few things keeping me from deleting my account is this stupid tradition. So with that said, I think this will be the last time I make a post about the number of happy birthday messages I receive.

It was fun while it lasted, but here is what is very likely the last Birthday Messages chart I'll ever post.

Blogger's picture scaling sucks.

The biggest surprise in these numbers is that I've maintained a relative steady number of facebook friends.

For those wondering, I had a nice birthday. For breakfast we went to a pancake breakfast for the nearby fire department, for lunch I made Reubens on the flattop and for dinner we went to my favorite Japanese restaurant in Davis and then did brownies and ice cream back at our house for dessert. It was a nice way to head into year 36.

Thanks for following along with my weird birthday message obsession all these years. 

A certain feeling

It's 11:30 in the morning on a Friday. I'm in my mid-to-late 20s. As usual I had worked 9 hours on Monday through Thursday and now I only needed to put in 4 hours on Friday, and my 4 hours of drinking coffee and reading Michigan sports blogs was now up. I walk out the front door of my office on Naval Base San Diego, holding only my now empty to-go coffee mug as I stroll to my car. It's warm, sunny and there is slight breeze blowing the palm trees that line the streets along the base. I'm in khakis, a polo shirt and light blue Pumas.

I get into my black Camaro and immediately pop on my sunglasses and roll the windows down, my iPod connects and my music is playing. I drive off base and head home ready to make myself a nice sandwich and a wash it down with a cold Tecate. Weekend plans are minimal - a wide open two and a half days in gorgeous Southern California lie ahead of me. But more literally lying ahead of me is a nearly empty freeway ready to take me home.

This brief 15 minute trip home is one of the rare times I can expect there to be minimal traffic in San Diego. This is perfect as I briefly merge onto the 5 (I-5) shifting from third into forth gear, and then I immediately exit onto the 15 (I-15). I'm still baffled why people in Southern California use "the" in front of their highways instead of "I-" or "Interstate". Once I get on the 15 I can open it up into 5th gear and really get going, but I'm only on the 15 for about a mile before I have to take the ramp to get on the 94 that takes me to my exit. 

The Ramp - Notice the white car making use of the shoulder

The ramp onto the 94, like most interchanges in Southern California, is a bit tighter compared to what you typically see in the Midwest. Because of this, the two-lane ramp is heavily banked, and as you go through the ramp it also increases in elevation to bring you up to the grade of the 94 as the ramp spits you out.

My deepest respect for whoever designed this ramp

By the time I enter the ramp, I've already assessed if the traffic will cooperate. More often than not, it does, and I enter the ramp in the leftmost lane going about 80-85. As the banking starts I let my foot off the gas as I drift over into the right lane and eventually cross the solid white line until I'm fully on the apron at the apex of the curve. I let up on the steering as I begin to ride back up the banking of the curve and downshift to 4th gear. As this perfect arc of a curve approaches it's conclusion, the road begins to level out, and just as the turn is complete and I stomp on the gas and the engine in my Camaro roars at high RPMs effectively having been launched out of the ramp still going about 70, and accelerating towards my house and my weekend, as I drive with the windows down, sun overhead, music blaring and 3 cups of caffeine in my veins plus now just a bit of adrenaline.

And that, my friends, is a certain feeling.

Feeling the Generational Divide

I've told my wife countless times and to this blog one time that I think UC Davis students don't seem to party nearly as much as I'd expect. In comparison to my recollections of Ann Arbor when I was a student, I'm still flabbergasted at how rarely I see students out drinking at the bars, and rarer still a drunken student stumbling down the sidewalk like I used to do every weekend when I was in school. Rarely do I see a lawn littered with solo cups on a Sunday morning or even a keg on a porch. I have always chalked this up to UC Davis just not having a party culture. (I asked our kid's babysitter who is a senior at UCD which were the cool student bars was and she was very unsure, but she probably also didn't want me trying to go there)

In recent months I've seen more and more reports about how Gen Z is drinking less, doing less drugs, having less sex and generally partying less. It's made me consider that when I compare Davis to Ann Arbor, I'm comparing 2022 Davis to 2008 Ann Arbor, and perhaps I'm really comparing Gen Z with my fellow Millennials. (But also based on my travels, I think the midwest state schools just drink a lot more)

I'm sure sociologists are hard at work studying why Gen Z is behaving differently than the Millennials that came before them. I suspect one of the biggest changes between when I was in college (2005-2009) and now is that the current generation came of age with the Me Too movement where society really reexamined their views on sex and appropriate sexual behaviors. (In addition to many of them being unable to party for 2 years due to COVID, and now they don't know how to throw down)

My generation came of age with movies like American Pie, Road Trip, and Old School guiding our views on sex and what high school & college should be like. It's not entirely surprising that we came to college expecting wild parties, casual hookups and wild adventures. And at least for me, my expectations for college were really shaped more than anything else by the writing of Tucker Max.

I discovered Tucker Max's website right after graduating from high school. He had these stories about wild nights spent drinking, getting into hilarious situations and scoring chicks. If 18 year old me had an idol he would have been it. I clearly was so enamored by him that no less than 5 times during college I wrote on this very blog about wanting to have a "Tucker Max Level Story". I still have his book, and I picked it up while writing this post and read back through some of it. 17 years later it really feels like those stories were from a different time and place and I'm not sure there would be the same audience for that the way there was in 2005 (both broadly, and personally).

It does make me wonder what our generation will be known for. Sure, I've heard us described as the internet generation or social media generation. But I think a generation is probably more defined by the generation that comes after it than by the those that came before it. Maybe I was part of the last carefree generation that grew up on 90s consumerism, raunchy comedies, a party culture, and before we really worried about our health, the environment or having our life ruined by a meme or misguided tweet like Gen Z does. It seems like Gen Z is under more pressure to do good and be good, and with all that pressure, I'm amazed they aren't turning to sex, drugs and alcohol to cope with it.