Something to Prove

Nine years ago I didn't know the first thing about repairing cars, but when you deliver papers for so long you pick a few things up. Trying to fix things as cheaply as possible means I've employed the help of my father-in-law as often as I can, and I've watched him every time. Of course, there's a big difference between watching and actually doing.

The lower ball joints are so bad in my car that my brand new tires went completely bald on the inside part of the tread in about a month. Already owing a bunch of money to my parents and future brother-in-law to fix my wife's car (which I can't even use because the window doesn't go down), I'm not about to pay a mechanic to fix it.

I would ask my future brother-in-law to help, given he doesn't have a job at the moment and is more experience than me, except my father pretty much used him as free labor for working on the last car. Now he just ignores my text messages, so I guess he's sick of helping out.

And that's the thing, when my father was using him, he wouldn't shut up about how great he was at working with cars. He just assumes I don't know anything, because that's what he does. Fixing it myself is a bit of a screw you to him. Though, he won't care.

Mainly it's that I don't have another $200 to pay a mechanic, though. Tomorrow it all goes down. The parts are in my trunk now. Wish me luck.

Cautiously Helpful

As I climbed down into the ditch to shovel away the snow packed up under my car so as to hopefully drive away without sliding further in, a man in a truck pulls into the driveway across the street and gets out. I assume he is the owner of the house I was delivering the paper to.

"Hey. I'm kind of in a precarious situation here with your metal mailbox." I say as he walks up.

"Oh, it's not mine. I just stopped to help." he replies.

"Oh great. Well, I've got a tow strap, I think you can pull me away from the mailbox if we hook it up there on the passenger side."

"Yeah...have you hooked it up before?" he asks awkwardly.

"Yeah, plenty of times." I say.

"Could you hook it up then?"

I've become very accustomed to that kind of exchange. Doing papers in Michigan means I've gotten stuck countless times throughout the years. It's why I carry a tow strap with me in my trunk. The first time a helpful stranger stopped to give me a hand, that back and forth left me a little confused. I didn't have my own tow strap at that point in time, and didn't have the first clue about where would be the best place to hook one. He'd stopped because he was in a truck and had his own tow strap. Surely he must have a better idea of where to hook one up, so why was he so adamant that I do it myself?

After I fumbled around and found someplace I could wrap it around the frame, it struck me. He was worried about getting sued if it had somehow damaged my car. Well, that got must have been a tad too paranoid for his own good I thought, and scoffed it off.

It didn't stop with him though. Every single person that has ever stopped to help pull me out of a snowbank has made the same demand. Not that I'd expect they lay down on the ground and hook it up themselves when I'm the one that needs help, but they always lead off with that request. If I didn't know any better, I'd swear that everyone was put through a strict course upon purchasing a truck where it is pounded into their heads to never hook up a tow strap to someone else's car.

The more likely scenario is that our society has made everyone scared shitless of being sued. The kind stranger stopping to help someone in need on the side of the road is often rewarded with a big fat lawsuit when the flimsy plastic body of the needy person's car is cracked in the process. It's sad, really. Even the few helpful people still out there have to be cautious about it.

I Apologize for Filler

Doing this One A Day thing has left me completely without ideas sometimes. So, I just write some filler content and call it good. I'm not proud of it, but it gets the day done.

I've had this personal blog for as long as I've had Cerebral Pop, and even longer than I've been writing for Bitmob, yet, it mostly sat unused. Something would happen to me, or I'd want to get my feelings about something off of my chest and into words, and I would procrastinate doing it until the words had long since passed me by. 

When I started writing it was entirely for myself and it made me feel good when I was down in the dumps. But as Cerebral Pop grows its stopped scratching that itch, as I have weekly features to tackle and reviews to write and deliver back to PR companies. So, over time I've stopped thinking of writing as something I do for myself to get things off my chest, and something more like a job (even though it has yet to pay me).

Signing up for the One A Day Project was my way of forcing myself to stop procrastinating and actually write about personal stuff as it happens to me. That being said, I have a boring life. Sometimes I have no idea what I can write about. I stared at the screen for hours last night trying to come up with something and I only ended up with those two sentences of pure filler. I guess I could just write about video games or something, but I always envisioned my One A Day posts as being completely about my life or how I feel about other things going on in the world, and if possible I'd like to keep them that way.

That might mean that I write pointless filler sometimes because I'm out of ideas, but the simple fact that I have to write every single day means that when something actually does happen I'll have it cataloged. I'm proud of a lot of the posts I've written for the One A Day Project. Not because they are expertly written, because editing and grammar is the last thing I care about on this blog, but because they are a still frame of my life. They capture a moment that my stupid forgetful brain would normally just let fade away. It's like a public diary; Even if no one else is interested, I'd like to look back at this stuff in the future.

So, if for some reason you're also interested in my personal life and feelings about things, then I apologize for all the filler. At least a couple times a week I tend to write something that I'm really glad I put to words, and maybe you'll enjoy that as well. In the future, I'll try to keep the filler a bit more relevant by peppering in things like "Things Emmy Says" or an "Interview with Emmy." Something that doesn't require a lot of thought, but I can still look back on and get something out of it.

Sue Me

I've starting trying to write my one a day article at about 6 pm. It is now almost 9:30 pm and I haven't written a thing. I might be out of ideas. I'll get back to you tomorrow.

Wishing Winter Would End

After we finished cleaning up from the biggest snowstorm since the seventies, a solar flare gave us all a much needed break from dealing with the snow. Almost all of the snow melted away last week, and I got to enjoy driving down a road without worrying about sliding off of it. Sadly, on Sunday morning we were dealt a harsh reality; it isn't Spring quite yet.

There wasn't as much of a fuss about this snowstorm, but based on the shoveling I had to do after both storms I'd say we got near the same amount of snow. The real problem is that our county barely has any money for snow removal this year, and the storm decided to come around on a Sunday when they'd have to pay overtime to all the plow drivers. Couple that with the fact that today is President's Day and they probably assumed not many people would have to work, and I had a rough time of delivering my paper routes.

I approached the first street I normally turn on and hesitated, but turn I did. I barely made it to the first driveway, where I wisely decided to bail out while I still could. I passed by the the three customers on that street and moved onto the next ones. After I got past the last possible place for me to give up and turn around, I realized I probably shouldn't have come this way either. I slowed to a stop in the middle of the road, with snow packed up under my car. I could move forward and backward, but not for more than a couple of feet. I was stuck.

I called my father-in-law, and waited to be rescued. He had to pull me at least a mile before we reached a road that hadn't been completely drifted over. I told him I was just going to skip the rest of the country roads and head straight into town to deliver those papers. I gave him enough papers to finish the country should he feel so inclined and ventured off.

Luckily the rest of the day went much better, and my father-in-law finished the country before I could get back to help him. I got home and started shoveling. Two hours later the driveway was finished, and I was exhausted.

It's not even that today was that much worse than some days I've had this winter, it was just that week's reprieve that got feeling fond of the springtime weather to come. Now that I've been thrown back into the harsh reality of winter, I want out. Really bad.

Having a Kid Made me a Sucker

*Spoilers for Benjamin Button, unless you took a minute to think logically about how that plot would logically end.*

As we sat and watched the end of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and that little baby closed it's eyes for the last time, my eyes welled up. It wasn't even the quality of the movie, I just immediately thought of my daughter when she was a baby, and it crushed me.

Recently a trailer was released for the upcoming Dead Island video game, and while most games shy away from including children in any sort of chaos, this one had one at the forefront of it all. Now, of course, the actual game might not be anything like that trailer, but either way, that trailer got to me in a way that a majority of gamers overlooked.

It starts with a little girl lying dead on the the ground and zooms out from her eye. In reverse, she flys upwards through the air, into a window, and onto a mans back where she takes to biting his flesh off. Inter-cut with the reversed drama inside the hotel room, is the normal forward-moving panic of the little girl trying to outrun a horde of zombies to get to the hotel room. She stumbles in front of the door, and the man who we've by now assumed is her father runs to pull her to safety. As the camera slows and focuses on his look of horror while he tries in vain to rescue his already doomed daughter, I turn into a sucker.

When any sort of media involves a child in danger, or dying of any cause, I inevitably think of my own. I live for that kid, and any thought of harm coming to her tears me up inside. When the window crashed down on her and cut open her nose, I was the most scared I've ever been. I clutched her against my chest as she bled on me and rushed downstairs yelling for Zoe. I've never felt that way before, but it's par for the course when it comes to parenthood.

I've always had a weird sort of complex. As I sit on the toilet in a truck stop bathroom, I start to think about what I would do if someone busted into my stall with a weapon, ready to mug me. I imagine that the best way to fight them off in that situation would be to use the top of the toilet tank to bash over their heads. Where I was, that'd easily be the best weapon at my disposal.

Since Emmy was born, that odd thought process has only increased, only now it revolves around Emerson. I constantly run through worst-case scenarios in my head. Hopefully one of those never comes to pass, but I guess I'll be prepared if they do. Because as a parent it is my job to make sure that the stuff I watch in movies and play in video games never happens to my kid.

Present Bias

On a past SModcast, Kevin Smith talked at length about people having a "present bias." They would assign so many tasks to the future, but once the future came they'd slack off. It's the classic "I'll start my diet tomorrow" issue that almost everyone has found themselves in. This is my problem every single day.

The bad part about delivering papers is that I have a lot of time to think, and absolutely no ability to do. Every day I craft long lists of everything I'm going to finish once I get home from work, and almost every day I fail to finish them. I'll open a new blog, and then I'll stare at it for awhile. Then I'll check Reddit. Then I'll get distracted by the TV.

Before you know it, the computer tells me it's bed time. I pump out my one a day post as fast as I can and close the laptop. Usually my biggest problem is how hard it is for me to concentrate with people talking, the TV on, and a child that either needs something or wants to watch cat videos on the computer that I'm trying to use to write.

The best way I've found so far is to put on headphones and play some sort of ambient background music loudly enough to drown out the distractions. Of course, this doesn't work for the visual distractions. Inevitably something will catch my eye and my "present bias" will kick in. "I kind of want to watch what's happening on this show instead of finishing this article." my mind foolishly thinks.

If only I could build some sort of chamber around my chair.

This One A Day Thing is Hard

When deciding that I would write one post a day on my personal blog for the entirety of 2011, I knew it'd be hard. I wanted a sort of snapshot of a year in my life. A catalog of what it was like raising Emmy, frustrations, triumphs, and all.

Of course, in order to have something to write about every single day, something somewhat significant needs to happen to me every single day. I live my life doing the same things and going in the same directions every day. I drive 130 or so miles in every 24 hour period, and it is literally the exact same path each time.

Makes it kind of hard to write about. If I make it through the entire year, I get the feeling I'm not even going to want to look back through these posts. Maybe I'll just start writing every single thing that Emmy does throughout the day.