The Humble Servant
Posted by Mark in The Humble Servant, Uncategorized on December 19th, 2009
When a blogger posts real time commentary regarding a live event it is usually called “live blogging.” I have never blogged live. For one thing, I am not comfortable using “blog” as a verb. The main reason that I do not blog live is that I usually don’t write about things anytime near when they actually happen.
But that changes right now. You could cut the tension with that little cut-and-paste scissor icon hiding somewhere up there in the menu.
The intrepid souls who have been reading The Ark of Mark since it was an email and not a blog will remember a feature called “The Humble Servant.” I would lay out, from personal experience, a series of steps one could take to become more humble. I haven’t done this in the blog until today, as I write about something that just happened a few minutes ago.
(I need something to do for a few minutes while my paintbrush dries out. What I just did right there is known as foreshadowing).
So let’s give a warm welcome to the return of The Humble Servant. As always, follow these steps in order to experience true humility:
- Take advantage of a snowy Saturday afternoon with no place to go by deciding to finish up some painting you’ve been avoiding.
- Turn on some good music and get to work.
- Move to a tricky side of a door jamb that requires cutting in. For those of you non painters out there, I should explain that “cutting in” refers to painting along some kind of interface. For example, one “cuts in” the blue paint on the wall where it butts up against a white door jamb. Cutting in requires patience, practice, a steady hand, and the steely nerves of an amateur blogger.
- Consider proudly that very few people can cut in quite as well as you are doing it. (In today’s example I had even moved to my non-dominant painting hand to get a better angle. I was in the zone).
- Decrease grip on brush handle in order to reduce possibility of a minor hand tremor that could lead to a wayward bristle.
- Lose complete control of brush handle such that brush totally slips out of your hand.
- (This step is an aside to explain that throughout my life I have noticed that I am better than the average person at catching dropped items. So good, in fact, that I once saved a dropped drinking glass by flicking my toe out at the last moment so that the glass glanced safely off my shoe rather than shatter on the floor. Those of you paying attention will detect some more foreshadowing right there).
- Instinctively begin to position hand to catch brush before it hits the floor.
- Inadvertently hit handle of brush such that brush begins cartwheeling in the air and flinging paint droplets in a whimsical pattern.
- Snag brush out of the air by seizing the painted end by the palm of your hand.
- Hurry off to find a wet washcloth to limit the damage, once again a humble servant ready for God to mold.
Let me say Merry Christmas to you all now just in case I don’t get back here before then. I may be too busy cleaning as-yet-unseen paint droplets.
Let me Consult my Dictionary
Thought I would pass along a conversation I overheard the other day.
Shelby: Mom! My leg bruise is changing to a different color!
Laura: What color is it changing to?
Shelby (pauses to inspect bruise closely): Vermillion.
Pinball Wizard (sort of)
Recently I was reminded of an old story that entertained me so much I just had to share. I will be careful about how I tell this because there is an outside, highly remote chance that the parties involved could hear about this, and there is also an outside, highly remote chance that the secret involved is still a secret (which would only make this funnier).
When I was in college I spent my summers working at a couple different places as an engineering intern. It was a glorious time of slow computers, bad golf shirts, and scads of homemade ham sandwiches for lunch which I stored all morning in an unrefrigerated desk drawer. Things are so much different today. Now I prefer turkey sandwiches.
I worked for one engineer who at one point had one of the only two computers in a very large building. For this computer to have been more primitive might have required a pull-starter. Surprisingly, this computer did include some sort of video game. The engineer had a technician buddy who would come in occasionally during lunch or on breaks to play the game for a few minutes.
Eventually the technician started talking primitive video game trash.
The game had one of those leader board features from the old arcade days where players could type in their initials (or, more likely, their favorite crude three-letter word) if their score made the top ten. The technician’s scores dominated the leader board and he made sure the engineer knew it.
So the engineer stayed after work one night (after the technician had gone) and posted a score in the top ten. A few nights later he played again and achieved the top score. The technician was a little bummed by this but undeterred. He increased his efforts and over the course of the next couple weeks finally got the high score back.
The engineer stayed after work again and reported the next morning that he had once again taken the top spot. The technician was good-natured but visibly frustrated at this news as he left the engineer’s office. It was clear he did not at all like how easily the engineer overtook him. I witnessed this exchange and the engineer must have felt guilty enough that it was time to come clean.
Or maybe he was just so proud he couldn’t keep it to himself.
It seems the engineer barely even knew how to play the game. You’re guessing he was having his kid play it for him, but no. After hearing the technician bragging one day, on a hunch the engineer poked around in the file directory where the game was stored. He located a simple text file with a name that was something like HIGHSCORES.TXT. Every so often he would simply go into that file and type himself up a new high score and move his buddy’s efforts down the list. To this day it remains one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of a guy pulling a fast one on a friend. Brilliant.
I guess the lesson here is the guy who is good at the game will always be topped by the guy who can game the system.
Driving Miss Shelby
So I drive seven-year old Shelby to work every day. This will probably not be the last post about this arrangement. Sometimes I think I should abandon my blog and just interview Shelby every few days and write down what she says.
So this week we’re driving to school and have the following conversation:
Shelby: Dad, do you know what would be a waste of hair gel?
Me (pause): Um, no. What would be a waste of hair gel?
Shelby: Sculpting your hair so that it looks like a chicken is sitting on top of your head.
Sittin’ Pretty
I have one quick follow-up to my recent post about my NASCAR extravaganza-rama-palooza-fest. Well, besides the fact that a friend of mine took my last NASCAR post and photo-shopped my head onto the body of the random guy standing next to Miss Sprint Cup.
I will not be sharing said photo.
Here’s what I wanted to add. I took two quick photos at the race that I wanted to use as a compare and contrast feature. Unfortunately I managed to misplace one of them, but it wasn’t the important one. Just imagine the biggest, fanciest, most expensive recreational vehicle you have ever seen lumbering down the interstate. I took a picture of one like that.
And then I took a picture of this one:
Who says today’s NASCAR is only a rich man’s sport? Just for fun, I decided to see how many interesting things I identify in this re-purposed school bus.
- It’s a re-purposed school bus.
- It was painted red and lovingly given a sporty white stripe.
- Window A/C units near driver and in back door.
- Electrical generator mounted on rear extension.
- Propane tank at-the-ready (sitting in the foreground).
- Viewing platform on top with “safety” railing.
- Ladder for handy viewing platform access.
- Obligatory Dale Earnhardt “3” and Dale Earnhardt Jr (throwback) “8” on rear (kind of obscured by the ladder).
- Painted windows for privacy in living quarters.
- Curtains in mid-section windows, presumably to give an airy feel to the breakfast nook.
- “His and her” (or perhaps “his and his drinking buddy”) stools for maximum comfort while sitting and watching 3.5 hour race.
I pretty much love that bus and would be willing to wager its owner has more fun at an average race than the guy in the fancy RV. I could only think of one obvious suggestion for him to add during his next upgrade.
Considering that he is watching race cars from inside the oval track, I think those stools need improvement. He should somehow work a swivel onto those stools. And then he should add an electric motor with a variable speed controller. Once the race starts, he could play around with the controller until he finds just the right speed that would allow him to rotate in sync with his favorite driver. If he wanted to get fancy he could add programmable settings so that he could also rotate at caution-flag speeds. Then again, if he wanted to get fancy he probably would be driving something else.
Treats or Tricks
Posted by Mark in Current Events on November 2nd, 2009
Saturday night here was beautiful, moonlit, and perfectly crisp. But this particular October 31st was unsettling. Most Halloween nights our family attends a fall festival at our church. (It’s sort of the opposite as when people hold a “holiday parade” because they don’t want to admit it’s Christmas). This year our fall festival was the night before Halloween, so for the first time in years I was home on Halloween night. I think the long absence caused me to lose touch with societal traditions.
There I was sitting at home, minding my own business. Suddenly I was accosted by a parade of colorful characters. They just showed up uninvited. They hid behind masks to obscure their true personalities. Some were funny and some were scary. While entertaining for a few minutes, they quickly wore out their welcome when they demanded more and more of my possessions. They seemed to think they were so special I should just be delighted to hand over everything I have. It was all really rather distasteful.
So I quickly switched from C-Span back to football.
Mark’s Excellent Adventure
Posted by Mark in Entertainment, Family on October 22nd, 2009
Hi, I’m Mark! You might remember from such blog posts as the one where I saw a Weinermobile, or made a fool of myself, or perhaps both.
It has been a while since our last visit. I have not been suffering from writer’s block. I have been suffering from a lack of interest. I might very well have had lots to write about, but I just didn’t feel like writing anything at all.
How are you? I am fine.
Since our last visit I have been on an adventure. And I mean a real adventure that would qualify as an adventure in the general sense, and not just in the watered-down sense that applies just to me. For example, anything that requires standing in line pretty much qualifies as an adventure for me.
I seek and enjoy a quiet life.
On Friday my dad flew into town in his very own airplane to pick me up. We then jetted (or more accurately, propellered) down to Charlotte to visit my sister, Cheri. Cheri loves NASCAR and has some friends with connections. I would love to thank those friends by name, but they might rather not have their names listed publicly as doing such favors.
Plus also this blog probably needs more readers to even qualify as “public.”
So here’s what we did on Saturday. Around lunchtime we went on a tour of the Hendrick Motorsports complex. Besides the normal tourist areas, we got to see places where NO PHOTOGRAPHY IS ALLOWED. I probably shouldn’t say too much about those particular areas lest large guys in jackets festooned with corporate logos show up and ring our doorbell with a tire iron. Let’s just say that the race shop of the leading teams in NASCAR (Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.) are a notch or two above Cooter’s garage in The Dukes of Hazzard. You could eat off the floor of Hendrick’s garage, but you’d feel guilty about getting crumbs on it.
After the tour we went to Lowe’s Motor Speedway well before the race We got to walk up and down pit road and right by the open garages where engines were loudly being checked out. Christian music star Toby Mac was doing a live concert in turn 4. We strolled by driver Bobby Labonte sitting in a golf cart with his wife as they watched the concert on the track apron.
Oh, and the actual race on this unseasonably chilly October night? We watched it from a heated suite. I told you Cheri’s friends have connections. But what I really need to tell you about is the pre-race drivers’ meeting.
We got to go to the pre-race drivers’ meeting.
Have you ever felt like you had walked into a book or movie and were no longer in the real world? That’s what the driver’s meeting was like. I’ve been watching NASCAR since 1997 so all the drivers and crew chiefs seem like TV characters and not real people. And there I was milling around with maybe 200 Joe Shmoes like me while the drivers sat and listened to a few instructions about the upcoming race. (“Fellas, we’re going to stick with counter-clockwise again this week”).
Don’t believe me? Here’s a poor quality photo I took of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. his own self:
Seeing all these guys was simply surreal. Richard Petty was there with his big hat and sunglasses. Richard Petty should not exist in flesh and blood. My brain processed seeing Richard Petty in person similarly to how it would process being in the same room as Batman. It just didn’t feel right.
Some say one’s true character is revealed in a high pressure situation. If so, I’m not quite happy about what transpired next.
After the meeting we were making our way to the door after most of the drivers had gone. I looked over and something caught my eye. There, in her gleaming white fire suit, was Miss Sprint Cup. For those of you not into NASCAR culture, I should explain that Sprint sponsors NASCAR’s top racing series. The trophy is called the Sprint Cup. Miss Sprint Cup is an attractive young lady who stands behind the race winner each week on TV in her Sprint fire suit and smiles. And smiles some more.
So there she was. Another character in the movie into which I was currently trespassing. I joked to Cheri that I should mimic the scene in Say Anything when Lloyd Dobler pauses briefly behind Diane Court so that a friend can snap a photo that makes it look like he was hanging out with her. I really wanted that picture. It’s not that I’m obsessed with Miss Sprint Cup (I already have dozens of photos of me next to my beautiful wife), it’s just that Miss Sprint Cup is so recognizable and I’m so uncool that it would be objectively funny for a picture of me beside her to exist.
Cheri said I should just go ask her to take a picture with me. She was just standing there talking to people like us. I hesitated. Then another dorky guy just walked up and asked her if he could get a picture with her. She smiled the TV smile and happily went along. Cheri all but pushed me forward. All I needed to do was say, “Excuse me, would you mind having another quick picture taken?” The poor girl is probably contractually obligated to be friendly, after all.
But I choked. Wouldn’t do it. Didn’t want to impose. So I went online and found Miss Sprint Cup on Facebook and grabbed a picture of her standing next to some other random guy that could have been me. You’ll have to use your imagination:
Miss Sprint Cup and a Random Guy
I regretted my lack of intestinal fortitude before we’d even left the room. I knew that next time such a unique opportunity arose, I could not fall short. I would come through. Who would’ve guessed that in less than sixty seconds I would happen across another well-known figure, even more recognizable than Miss Sprint Cup?
This time, I did not crumble under the pressure:
Mark and Count Chocula
So I ended up with a picture of me standing next to Count Chocula instead of Miss Sprint Cup. Upon reviewing the photo and noticing the angular features and prominent chin, this was probably a better match anyway.
Wigging Out
How little can it cost to entertain a creative seven-year old girl? About $0.99 for a blank Styrofoam wig holder, plus some markers.
Shelby named her Cornelia. The braided ponytail you see is pinned to the back of her (Cornelia’s) head. Rather than try to create realistic-looking eyes, Shelby decided it made more sense to assume her eyes were closed and go for the green eyeshadow.
Cornelia watched a football game with me Saturday night, which was a little creepy. (I suppose I should point out that the football game was on TV. I did not take Cornelia out of the house. That would be a lot creepy).
Safety First
The theme of today’s blog entry is Safety. I’ll pause while you fellow children of the ’80’s fondly recall your Men Without Hats album (you’ll notice I didn’t say “albums”).
Shelby went on a second-grade field trip with her class on Monday. They went to a place that features a miniature layout of the city of Lexington with sidewalks, working stoplights, drivable mini cars, etc. Sounds pretty neat. (Jacob was quick to give her some inside scoop and told her that five years ago when his class went, the red car was the fastest). Uniformed police officers taught the kids about general safety and situational awareness. At some point during the trip Shelby was running around and fell and scraped her knee. She managed to come home with an injury and bandages from a field trip to a place called “Safety City.”
It reminded me of the time I almost rear-ended a car because I was distracted trying to read a road sign that was alternately flashing “Warning!” and then “Slow Traffic Ahead!”
In somewhat of a coincidence, like Shelby I also spent part of my Monday in a heightened state of situational awareness. Some co-workers and I attended a retirement lunch for a colleague at a Japanese restaurant. Perhaps I should clarify that he wasn’t a colleague AT a Japanese restaurant. He was a colleague at OUR workplace and we went to the Japanese restaurant to celebrate. Anyway, we all sat around one of those open Hibachi grills manned by a chef with a flair for the dramatic. (Presumably the less flamboyant chefs are relegated to steaming rice back in the kitchen).
We were enjoying the cooking performance as he brandished and twirled his knife and spatula (contrary to popular opinion, it is indeed possible to brandish a spatula). Have you ever wondered what might add an unanticipated degree of excitement to watching a Japanese chef cook right in front of you? I can tell you. Try noticing that the chef’s index finger is covered in a heavy bandage.
Well, then.
I thought about his finger injury while watching him cut and chop about thirty inches from my eyeballs, which I happen to hold in high regard. Just what circumstances led him to cut his finger, and wouldn’t a similar loss of utensil control be even more likely to recur now that he had a heavy bandage getting in the way?
I tried not to flinch while contemplating. This is the bane of the introspective person. Fortunately one of my co-workers is much less socially inept than I, and simply asked, “Hey, what did you do to your finger, there?”
The chef smiled knowingly and assured us that it was not an on-the-job injury. We all shared a good laugh, relieved to learn that he hadn’t cut his finger extracting a wayward Ginsu from the abdomen of a patron. He went on to explain that what happened to his finger was that he watched an NFL game with some buddies on Sunday. One of them said something like, “Hey, you’re a chef! Why don’t you make something for us to eat during the game?” He smiled sheepishly and explained that he did prepare some food for the group but it “didn’t turn out too well.”
So we customers didn’t have anything to worry about because he didn’t hurt himself cooking at work, he only hurt himself cooking at home. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume there is a nuance in his argument that I have simply yet to grasp. Everybody knows a nuanced argument can be harder to grasp than a spatula.
Secretary of Transportation
On a recent night I was alone downstairs with the kids. I think Jacob and I were watching a football game while Shelby played a computer game nearby.
When Shelby’s bedtime came I went over and kneeled to watch the game she was playing for a minute. When she finished the game she leaned over, put her arms around my neck and gave me the best hug she’d ever given me. I said something like, “Wow! I sure wasn’t expecting to get such a great hug right now!”
Very matter-of-factly, she said, “I’m just looking for transportation.”
I pulled back and we looked silently at each other’s face for a moment while I tried to figure out what in the world she was talking about. This is not an uncommon situation in our house. We often ask her to translate into English the language of whatever alternate reality she currently inhabits.
It turns out that she was simply tired and ready for bed, and was looking for an easy way to get out of the high-armed chair she was sitting in at the computer. She figured if she latched onto my neck, when I stood up I would automatically lift her up and out of the chair. Transportation. She started giggling as she explained it to me, realizing how funny it was that I mistook her scheming for a simple hug.
We shared a good laugh and I let her ride piggyback upstairs to her room. So my seven-year old daughter successfully used false affection on her hapless father in order to gain transportation. I never would’ve imagined anything like this could happen. I mean, at least not until she turns sixteen.