Little Richard

Coming home the other night I flipped over to 1690AM, because, as usual, all the songs on the multiple FM stations available were total crap, and after some nondescript enjoyable song Little Richard burst onto the radio...


I'm not exaggerating. Burst onto the radio is a perfectly good description of Little Richard's early catalog. "Long Tall Sally" was the song, and good giggly wiggly, I had not heard it in a long time.
http://youtu.be/jqxNSvFMkag
I grew up listening to Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Elvis thanks to my dad's record collection. Luckily he taped most of these onto 8-Tracks that we could take on the road with us. These rock 'n roll pioneers in addition to The Everly Brothers, John Lee Hooker, and Jerry Lee Lewis would keep me more than entertained on long rides in the Buick Electra Estate wagon -

Imagine it in baby blue with the fake wood paneled rocker panels and you'd have the Benefield Family Truckster.

So, back to the point. Little Richard. That excitement. That mania. That full-out, no holds barred drive. Wow. That totally spoke to me as a kid.

"Ooh, My Soul" - http://youtu.be/C0zxESS3djI

Damn. Listen to that. I can only imagine how that scared so many upstanding, good citizens to DEATH back in the 1950's. If it wasn't enough for Elvis to be out there wigglin' and gyratin', then add Little Richard beating that piano and throwing down some serious rhythm and rock, Chuck Berry being a lyrical mastermind that tapped into the brains of so many teenagers, regardless of their race.


So I'm digging Little Richard and all these other guys and then I discover The Beatles.  And I dive in head first.  All about them.  Then I discover Them Beatles love Little Richard too.   Hot Damn.


Where is this going?  Nowhere.  It doesn't have to. If nothing else, it got you to listen to two Little Richard songs that hopefully made your day better.  


Do yourself a favor and go read a little bit about Little Richard. It's an interesting read.  


I leave you with one more for the road...
"True Fine Mama"
http://youtu.be/YewBlXfkAK8

Maybe I was wrong?

I was around hipsters tonight. Real hipsters with beards and beanies and awkwardly fitting shirts. I'm not sure I'm a hipster like I thought. It looks like a lot of effort went in to those appearances. A lot. I don't think I'm up for that.

A Reluctant Hipster

I have recently come to accept something about myself that I have denied for a long time. Something that makes me fall into a category. Fit a label. I am…a hipster. To those of you who know me this probably doesn’t seem like a revelation to you. I still have a hard time saying it.

Why have I resisted? What’s wrong with being a hipster? I like the clothes from Urban Outfitters. I wear cool hats - Sharp Cats Wear Cool Hats. Honestly, I’ve only known about the current use of the word for a few years now. I associate it closely with another label. It rhymes with “smoosh rag”. Ugh. I actually had to take a three minute break after writing that. A Get Up and Walk Around break. I’m going to have to learn to separate these two terms in my mind.

Historically hipsters have been those on the edge of knowing about and being into what’s cool before it becomes Cool. Jazz guys, beatniks. I thought it was just recently that the term has taken such a negative slant, but apparently people have been deriding hipsters since the mid 90s.

It became clear to me over Halloween what I was when my costume was a Hipster. I was so excited because I think of hipsters as easily mock-able characters. I mean, there’s a Web Site, www.latfh.com, there’s a Facebook page dedicated to people mocking them. I would get the perfect costume and be totally in character; jaded, detached, pretentious. I had the costume part, but I couldn’t pull off the attitude convincingly. I thought that was bad, but I was wrong.

“Hey Thomas, what’s your costume?” friends asked.

“I’m a hipster!”

“…”

“How is this different from normal?”

“I don’t see a difference.”

/blank stares/

{Great.}

So instead of it being funny that I was mocking hipsters it became ironic that I was dressed as a hipster, but not actually in a costume, at least according to all present at the party.

In my mind hipsters are those guys that grow fuzzy beards, wear thrift store pants and t-shirts. They work hard at their image of Not Caring. Their attitudes suck. They’re indie record store employees as exemplified in the movie adaptation of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. It’s nothing I want to have associated to me. It’s like I told Daughter One when she asked me what a hipster was. I told her it was someone who thinks they’re cooler than they really are.

So I guess since I’ve decided to accept this label then what I need to do is reclaim it from those people I’ve been talking about. The bearded, PBR swilling, fixed-gear riding thugs. They’re not hipsters. They’re pseudsters.

But then again, doing that makes me just like them, and that was the problem initially. I don’t want to be like them. As Robert Lanham points out in his The Morning News piece, “The rage and self-loathing associated with hipsters has become more annoying, more naive, and more artificial than hipsters could ever hope to be.” That’s not what I want. So what now?

I’ll tell you what. I’m going to kick up my pretentiousness level about four notches. Not really. I’ve never thought of myself pretentious; although, I’m sure I have seemed that way to some. Dear Wife would probably say I am about The Beatles. I suppose I wouldn’t necessarily argue that. Also, I’m going to use my newly accepted label as an excuse to get more of my pants tapered and buy me some skinny jeans. Not the super skinny ones though. They don’t give a guy a lot of room to breathe or move around.

Here’s a link to Lanham’s article - http://www.themorningnews.org/article/look-at-this-fucking-hipster-basher

Pacing Myself; A Setback

Right, so school has started back and dammit all I have suffered a setback.

I was so proud of myself with the whole eating thing. I was really taking the time to do this right. Slowing down, chewing, enjoying, everything. Well, as I said school has started back, and as I put in my original post about eating I don't have much time to eat everyday, so...

sigh

Yes, I have started inhaling my food again. I was thinking that I had, but then talking with a friend who eats around the same time I got verification.

"Yeah! I saw it," she started, "his lunch was there and then shhhhhhhup! It was gone".

It's bad enough knowing you've had a setback, but it makes it a little more humiliating when someone can bear witness to it.

So, back to step one: Eating, Take Two.

Bear with me folks, this ain't gonna be easy.

Pacing Myself, Part Two

Eating

Okay, so this may be a little harder than I thought. Both the Challenge and writing as often as I said I would Currently no one is reading this, so I don't feel bad at all. I suppose there are some good things that come from a life of procrastination. So on to learning to pace myself while I am eating.

First off, I guess I have an extra challenge in this category specifically because of my being a teacher. Lunch for my students is 30 minutes. That is from start to finish. This does not take into account the three minutes, sometimes five that it takes to get my 20 something students from my room to the cafeteria, make sure they are settled in line, go to teacher's lounge [no longer the smoky den of scariness it was when we were kids], get my lunch, go to the bathroom, wash my hands, eat my lunch, and visit with my peers. This is assuming that no parent comes up and needs an impromptu conference or some teacher that has already had their lunch stops to talk to me about any number of important or trivial things, or I don't have copies to make for my next class. This whole process gives me approximately 21 minutes to eat. That's not exactly a great setting for learning to slow down to enjoy my meals. Because I have been doing this 5 days a week for the past 14 years I am kind of in the habit of doing it quickly.

This is not to say that I have not tried to learn to slow down a little. I actually have started slowing down a little with my eating. I would say the main reason for curbing my eating speed of course is my cookie eating habit. I used this verb earlier, but you might not have taken notice. Inhale. While that is an action associated with breathing, I believe that I can apply it to my method of eating cookies without much exaggeration.

Cookies, in my opinion, are to be devoured, and I have found over the last 30 something years that the best way to do this is to put the whole cookie in my mouth. Chomp, chomp, chew, chew swallow, on to next cookie. Unfortunately this allows me to eat many more cookies than I should because my stomach, poor thing, can't keep up with the speed of which I put things into it. It's sitting there, doing its job, digesting slowly while I continue to pile item after item into it. So by the time the stomach realizes, 'Wait a minute. This fool has just eaten 6 of those Oreos and I haven't even started digesting the first on yet.' So after the sixth one, Senor Stomach applies the brakes. I usually would be happy to keep going, but biology, in this case, wins out over desire.

"What's the problem with that," you may be asking. You also might be thinking, 'Ugh, I'm glad I don't eat with him.' These are both valid points actually. The problem is that as I have gotten older my body's ability to quickly burn off the calories of six cookies has slown down significantly. There's also the issue of the second thought just mentioned. I have been known to be a little self absorbed at times, and when I'm eating would definitely be among those times. Being a better eating partner, aesthetically at least, is taking some work on my part, but then isn't that point of this thing? Me working on things like that?

So, I continue overall trying to slow my eating down. I have made some progress recently. I have got in my head, at least partially, that eating is not a race, and besides beings able to say "I win!" at the dinner table, there is no prize for finishing a full meal in under 10 minutes. I am seeing that enjoying the tastes of food over the course of a meal is a nice thing, and while I can't see taking as long as say an hour to eat as some people I have known are able to do, I do now see that it makes for a more relaxing and enjoyable eating experience.

So I'm going to chalk "Eating" up to a positive change experienced by me. Go me! I'll have to continue to work at it, but being aware of it is a big thing.

Next up - Drinking

Pacing Myself

I've decided to accept a challenge from my lovely, brilliant wife. She's been recommending that I blog about pacing myself. You see, I have a problem with charging blindly through things. It's not as if I am not enjoying them, I am. I really, really am. I suppose I should back up a little and give examples of what I rush through.

Eating, drinking, shopping, driving, walking, running, playing games. Well, I am hoping that you get the picture.

So, my brilliant one suggests this challenge; try to learn to pace myself and I should document it here on this blog. I don't really have anything else going on here. I've had a few good entries, but seriously, there's nothing much here to hold the attention of many people. I resisted for a long time. I'm still not even completely sure I'm on board. I move fast. I don't know why. I used to move slowly and methodic, well, let's not be silly, I have never done much methodically, but I remember my older brother and a friend of his talking about how I use to walk so slowly and coolly. I guess you could say cocky. Yes, I used to be a seriously cocky kid. I'm not sure what gave me the attitude, but I had it. I don't know when I lost that attitude either. I don't know if there was some traumatic event that I have buried deep in me psyche or it was puberty, or what, but one day I was slow moving Joe Cool and the next day I was in Full Time Fast Forward (FTFF).

As I said, I don't know what prompted this change, but it happened, and I just accepted it. Here's an example of my FTFF. Eating Oreos. I am not a pull them apart, lick the icing, eat the cookies kind of guy. I go for the whole cookie in one bite. CHOMP. Gone and gone. Good and good. Right? Right. So, why would I want to pace myself with this?

I think I got my first taste of pacing and how it could be beneficial this summer. I was "training" to run the Peachtree Road Race. Training means going out and trying to run so I wouldn't die while doing the actual event. Every time before this summer that I have tried to go running I have tried to run like I did when I was a junior in college and could go for several miles at a good pace. Needless to say I never made it far, and I always felt like my heart would bust out of my chest from beating so hard. So for some reason this summer I decide to slow down a little and just, you know, jog. Well low and behold, I was able to run for 20 straight minutes without stopping, and when I did stop I didn't feel Death was tapping me on the shoulder asking me to dance. I ran several times during that outing and when I got home I was amazed. AMAZED I tell you. So I begin to think that maybe there was something to this pacing thing afterall. I'm not sure why I doubted the idea. My life would generally be easier if I just went along with her ideas.

So, here's my plan; I'm going to try some experiments over the course of the school year on pacing, and I will post those experiments and the results here. I am going to try once a week, every other week at most. I think I can make it entertaining enough for you, but if not just think, you won't have wasted any money, just time.

First up - Eating.

Dear Life

Dear Life,

How odd is it that I'm writing to you? Did you ever think you'd hear from me, or that I'd just lived you and not take the time to ask some things of you? Being this is the first letter to you from me I'll keep it simple this time. I'm not promising anything for future postings, understand?

There are so many things to ask, I don't necessarily know where to start...how about Life as a Parent? How great is it that I'm getting to live out this thing, Life as Parent? It's great. Not all the time, mind you. Sometimes it's a real pain in the ass, but looking at my girls and seeing my wife and I in the things they do, say, and ways they respond, it's amazing. AMAZING!

I sit here in the house and hear them playing, arguing, fighting, eating or watching Boomerang, and I feel like I'll always hear those sounds. Then I remember that my parents used to hear those same sounds from my brother and I, and I wonder if they thought the same thing? Even though there is still a lot of time left for our girls to be here and do all the things in the house that I love and loathe, grand scheme time frame it's such a short blip on the screen. My oldest was asking when she would get a car. "When you're 16" I said, not really thinking anything about it. "Coooool" she answered. Then it hit me, that's only 9 years from now. That's crazy!

I know that all parents have these thoughts, but I still wonder did our parents have them, and did their parents have the same thoughts about them when they were kids? I think it must be so, and I think that it's so funny that you, Life, go through the same thing generation after generation with only little changes.

So, Life, what I'm wondering is did you plan it this way, or are people just people and not much changes. Is there something to be learned in this repetitive cycle? I could easily focus on how 9 years could fly by in the blink of an eye, 7 years certainly has, or I can just live it, enjoying the girls and my wife and friends.

I guess that's it for now, Life. You're pretty sweet right now, and I'm very appreciative of that; although sometimes I know it doesn't seem that way. Rest assured, I do know it, and I do appreciate it.

Until next time...

Bub