Musings from Brian J. Noggle

So this surfaced in the automobile recently:

And I thought, Cool, one of the boys made a throwing star.

Then I noticed it had six points, and I thought Maybe it’s a Jewish throwing star.

Then I noticed it was made of Christmas cardstock and bears the initials of one of the boys, which might indicate it was a Christmas-themed throwing star.

That it might, in fact, be a wreath never entered my mind.

Because wreaths are not as cool as throwing stars.

And I’m sure no boys of mine would use that as decoration.

And as to it surfacing now, three months after Christmas, well, let’s just say that my children are not timely with the contents of their backpacks. They have delivered Christmas cards for their teachers in the following May on occasion. (The occasion being Christmas. Every year.)

Here at Nogglestead, we’re looking for some replacement ceiling fixtures for our kitchen, and I’m reluctantly browsing Amazon for possibles.

I say “reluctantly” because I’d rather touch the items and look over the boxes before buying, but when we hit the local big box hardware store this weekend, we found a couple of possible units, but our kitchen currently has six lights, and we’d like to replace them one for one. But Lowes only stocked three or four of each light type, and we were hoping to get this done soon. So I’m browsing Amazon.

Which is proving that you have to be very, very careful in reading all the mangled English. At least in the keyword-choked item names.

Like this one:

Clearly, someone learned Peter Jackson’s perspective tricks from filming The Lord of the Rings or someone is just photoshopping things in. Because that is the biggest 3.5 inch light I’ve ever seen, or the smallest bedroom.

Today, I:

• Participated in my second Y Not Tri indoor triathlon at the Pat Jones YMCA.

  

  It’s my second year in a row, and my third overall triathlon. The morning did not get off to an auspicious start. I have my phone alarm set for five and six am (in case I want to sleep in, I can just shut the alarm off and go on sleeping without fumbling to reset the alarm). So last night, I turned off the five o’clock alarm so I could sleep in directly, but I’d failed to remember that just last week I set the alarms off on Saturdays since I like to sleep in (generally, until seven, which is a far, far cry from what “sleeping in” meant in my younger days). Fortunately, though, I awakened at 6:11 and managed to get to the YMCA plenty early to check in.

  While checking in, we were to put our own numbers on our biceps instead of having a volunteer do it for us. So I looked down, and did my best, and inked my number right side up but backwards.

  So I wrote it again under it.

  

  I tried to tell everyone I did the first one like the flag patch on the right sleeves of the military (backwards, but to make it look like the military is charging into the wind). I’m not sure anyone bought it.

  So I survive the triathlon, and then I jumped into my car and raced westward so I could…

• Attend a martial arts class.

  I got to the martial arts school seven minutes before class (that is, 23 minutes after I finished the triathlon), dressed out, and hit the water fountain. I didn’t drink a lot of water during the triathlon because I didn’t want to swallow a lot of air, but then I had about a liter of water in the truck. Which meant when I put on the heavy gi, I started sweating a lot, and I briefly wondered what I was doing.

  But I got through the class okay. I didn’t make too many tired mistakes while sparring (well, my head would have only been knocked off once or twice).

  But I made it through, and more importantly, I impressed my beautiful wife.

  Later in the day, a little logy from the day’s activities and a short nap, I went out again, where…

• I Went to the antique mall and bought a charming little Tiffany lamp that is perfect for our mantel.

  

  I got home just in time for the dinner hour, but nobody was really hungry since we’d stopped at a pizza buffet for lunch, so…

• I baked some delicious chocolate banana bread.

  

  I have a very rigorous banana-eating timeline, which is as follows:

  Week 1: I LOVE BANANAS! I EAT ALL THE BANANAS!
  Week 2: I buy an extra couple bunches of bananas to sate MY DESPERATE NEED FOR BANANAS!
  Week 4: I need to do something with these very ripe bananas.

  This has happened a couple times in a row (well, the row is several calendar months). The last time, we gave the second loaf of banana bread to the teachers at my boy’s school. Tomorrow…who knows?

So, basically, the masculinity arithmetic today was basically a wash.

As part of a continuing series called “Brian J.’s Three Quarter Life Crisis” (previous entries include “Brian J. Learns A Martial Art”, “Brian J. Does Triathlons”, and “Brian J. Publishes A Book Of Poems“), I took gift cards from Christmas and my recent birthday and bought an electric guitar.

To be honest, it is not my first. When I was at the university, I bought a bass guitar and noodled with it for a while, including actually getting together on a couple occasions with a couple guys with other instruments and jamming with them (that is, strumming or picking the bass guitar clumsily while they picked their instruments clumsily, or in the case of my sessions with The Variation Machine, actually pretty good).

But I did not pursue it and did not stick with it with any discipline. I had a lot of time–witness the number of poems and short stories from the time as well as the spoken history of the era. But I lacked patience.

Before I got the bass guitar, I asked for a keyboard for Christmas in 1990, and I got two (the reduplicative benefits of a broken home–one from the mother and one from the father). I tinkered with it a bit, trying to do a little autodidactic learning on it, but I could barely read music and play with the right hand, sort of. I learned “Suicide is Painless” (the theme from MASH), but little else. I wrote a song for a girl named Peggy who was in my Bio 2 class and another English class, but when I told her, she and a friend mocked me through one particularly long Bio 2 lecture. The song even featured using the left hand. Was it any good? I’ll have to ask the beneficiary of Peggy’s disdain: My beautiful wife, who can play all the instruments and even some that have not been invented yet.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I’ve not had much luck with follow through on the musical instruments.

I’ve not had a lot of luck with autodidacticism in other areas. Like trying to learn software programming. I mean modern software development. I’ve written programs before, but I’ve not had much luck with putting all the pieces together on a language or an application. Part of it has been time, of course–since I’ve had children and a family, full evenings dedicated to a hobby has disappeared. So I don’t have the time.

But I have learned patience. I definitely credit the years of martial arts classes for this. When studying or playing with anything in the past, I’ve always found that I learn a lot rapidly and take pride in it, but then I plateau and become disappointed that I’m no longer rapidly advancing. I end up putting things aside, and going onto something else. But I’ve learned how improvements become more subtle over time, and just putting in the effort and time generally leads to improvement.

So I’m hoping to apply that lesson to learning the guitar. A little bit of practice every day, and eventually I will learn it.

I’ve also learned that I do not learn mechanical or physical things from books very well. I’ve discovered YouTube videos for insights on making mechanical and household repairs, so I’ll start out with this guy teaching me guitar:

He seems very patient. And British.

And if this does not work, I will get lessons. Another thing I’ve learned in my crisis journey is that even though I’m not friendly enough or extroverted enough to natively join a community, I can pay someone to tolerate me enough to teach me something. One would think that I would have learned this in my youth, when I spent tens of thousands of dollars for professors to humor my dreams of being a best-selling author or famous poet. Oh, but no.

At any rate, ask me again in six months about my progress to see if I can stick with it as much as I’d like to think I can (this time).

Also, drop me a line if you want to be in my rock and roll band. I have a cool idea and concept, but I’m not sure how well my voice can hold up to grindcore, and my children’s voices haven’t changed yet.

I’ve read a couple of things on other blogs recently that I’ve disagreed with. So, here, let me briefly note them:

• From Hoosier Boy, we get a rip on the classics:
  

  To the meat of the matter: Catch-22 is drivel; unreadable schmaltz. So is From Here to Eternity. In fact, many of the so-called classics are crap, Moby Dick first and foremost. Joyce, Cervantes, and Milton all are impossible to read. Hawthorne I can manage, but why would I want to? Bunyan, blah. I will take bawdy Moll Flanders over The Vicar of Wakefield any day.

  The blogger wants entertainment with his classics.

  You know, he’s not far off in deriding more modern classics–particularly the stuff that comes out of the 20th century. Classics before that are generally popular. I mean, Shakespeare wasn’t high-faluting. The novels of Austen were popular and entertaining to their set. Hemingway, sure. Faulkner–well, that’s 20th century academic classics talking.

  With a lot of things in translation, what’s ‘classic’ is what’s based on an academic’s taste and inclination in translation as well. I always assign an asterisk to what I read in translation anyway. And the aforementioned Indianan made it through War and Peace but I didn’t. I can tell you why: It’s keeping the characters straight. It’s bad enough when it’s a big cast in a broadly focused saga; it’s far worse when each character has multiple appellations depending upon who’s talking to him.

  Popular classics from yesteryear become less approachable when the argot and manner of expression changes, whether across cultures (such as War and Peace and other Russian classics) or centuries (one can appreciate Shakespeare’s occasional turn of phrase without getting the jokes). To really grok the works like that, you really have to dive into them and read a bunch from the era or culture. Then you’ll be steeped in it and might even get the jokes without the footnotes. Back in college, I did get the jokes in Shakespeare because I was concurrently reading Jonson and Chaucer and contemporary poets, so I was conversant in Middle English. But I’m not that way now, and it’ll take a little work to get back to that.

  But it does take a little effort to really get into those classics, and they’ll be more entertaining if you’re so inclined. I am, mostly because I’m pretentious and want to read the classics.

  But it’s a matter of taste, and not everyone is going to like everything.

  But, yeah, James Joyce’s work might be the last couple of things on my shelves that I would read should medical science make us virtually immortal.

  (Link via Dustbury.)

• In a book report for the tome The Joy of Not Working, I questioned whether the book was relevant in the 21st century:
  

  Perhaps the message was on-point in 1997, but we’ve got a couple self-actualizing generations that have sought meaning outside work (or meaningful work instead of careers) since then. So many of the lessons aren’t applicable to more modern readers.

  Kim du Toit would probably disagree based on his post Working Dogs:

  I took an older guy somewhere during my early-morning Uber shift, and we got to chatting about retirement. He was in his early sixties and was thinking about retirement in the next couple of years or so — he’d reached all the retirement “qualifications” in terms of his age, length of service, and so on — and when I asked him what he was going to do after retirement, he said quite simply, “I don’t know.” He had no outside interests other than his work, he said, and had no hobbies or anything to keep him occupied when he would quit working.

  This set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, because I’d confronted the very same thoughts when I planned on retiring back in 2016 on reaching age 62 (which seems to be the “killer” age discovered by the researchers).

  Worse than that, I either know men personally or have heard of many instances of men who have died soon — very soon — after retiring early. (When men retire at a later age, they paradoxically seem to live longer, as the study shows.) Sometimes, men die within six months of getting their gold watch, after many decades of working with little or even no time off for illness. Where I differ from the study is that I think I know the real reason why this happens.

  We’re working dogs.

  Perhaps I’m a little closer to the millenial mindset than I like to admit, or perhaps I’m just laid back, but their experience differs from mine.

  On the plus side, people in my line die at sixty, give or take, so I won’t have to worry about dying after I retire.

• As you know, gentle reader, I have been known to read comic books even though I’m ::cough, cough:: nearing fifty years old (see Personal Goal Reached, Revisited and Things To Do In Tampa While Traveling For Business).

  Kim du Toit probably would not approve:

  Whenever I’m asked why I haven’t seen the new Masters of the Galaxy (or whatever it’s called) movie, I simply reply that I quit reading comic books at about age 11*, as should every adult. The storylines are boringly repetitive, the action equally so, and the characters’ emotions are, well, set at comic-book level (which is what’s required for a preteen audience who don’t have the mental software to appreciate or even recognize complex emotional issues). It’s fine for kids, in other words; but if someone age 50 tells me he’s still seriously into comic books and/or their movie derivatives, I actually start to wonder about his mental maturity.

  You know, I sometimes wonder about what it says about me that I still pick up comic books from time to time. I do prefer the ones from my youth, though; stuff that I have seen from this century, if you can believe it, is more simplistic as the focus has shifted from the story and the writing to the pictures, as though the pictures themselves are the worth of the thing. No, not really. The stories are.

  But as far as being repetitive, you might recall that I’ve noticed how much Shakespeare mixes and matches the same elements in his plays. And, to be honest, is an issue of Jennifer Blood: Born Again that much of a step down from men’s adventure paperbacks? Probably not.

  Suddenly, I’m all defensive about my reading habits. Aw, who cares, read what you want. Classics, comic books. Just have something interesting to say about them.

COME AT ME, INTERNET!