Ask for Help

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This is the first, and most important, lesson of teams: ask for help. So we live by this lesson. If they don’t ask us for help, they never learn who we are and what we have to give. It can be frustrating for us, and hard for them, but not as frustrating and hard for both as us wasting ourselves upon people who do not want what we urge upon them. — Jim McCarthy Read more →

Gerry Rafferty, 1947-2011

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Just one more year and then you’ll be happy . . . If that doesn’t sum up what life is all about, I don’t know what does. Just one more year till I lose some weight, gain some weight, get married, get divorced, get out of school, go back to school, get pregnant, get the kids out of the house, get a job, quit my job, etc., etc., etc. Then I’m really going to start living! R.I.P. Gerry Rafferty. Read more →

Twitter: 2011-01-04

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Trying to teach my dog to yawn on command when I say "Sleepy?" Has anyone done this? # If a God has made this world, then I would not like to be the God; its misery and distress would break my heart. — Schopenhauer # Read more →

All in the Waiting

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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. — T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” Read more →

EppsNet at the Movies: Tender Mercies

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I don’t know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk, and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out, marry me. Why? Why did that happen? Is there a reason that happened? And Sonny’s Daddy died in the war, my daughter killed in an automobile accident. Why? See, I don’t trust happiness. I never did; I never will. — Mac Sledge Read more →

Christmas in Las Vegas

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My son makes the observation that there are no balconies in Las Vegas hotels. We’ve got a room on the 24th floor of Bellagio, overlooking the fountains, which allows me to visually scan other hotels up and down the strip, and by god I think the boy is right. Am I the only person who didn’t know that? Of course it makes perfect sense once someone points it out. The Vegas mindset requires that a disproportionate amount of attention be directed to winners . . . lights flashing, bells ringing, people screaming with glee . . . meanwhile, 99 other people are silently losing their ass. Clearly it’s going to put a damper on things to have the losers flinging themselves off the balconies of high-rise hotels. Read more →

If Stieg Larsson Wrote Don Quixote

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The last two novels I’ve read are Don Quixote and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Don Quixote has no plot. Event follows event but it all grows naturally out of character and conditions. The characters are immortal, independent of time and place. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is nothing but plot. It’s a good plot but none of the characters are interesting outside the confines of the story. They certainly have no sense of humor. Cervantes takes 900 pages to allow his two principal characters to reveal themselves through their words and actions. Larsson just blurts everything out: Erika was an organizer who could handle employees with warmth and trust but who at the same time wasn’t afraid of confrontation and could be very tough when necessary. She and Mikael often had differing views and could have healthy arguments, but they also had unwavering confidence in each other,… Read more →

A Sherlock Holmes Christmas

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My kid comes home and sees three newly wrapped Christmas presents . . . “That’s a book,” he says, pointing at one of the presents. Then moving on to the other two: “I don’t know what that is, and I don’t know what that is. I’m on to you guys.” “What are you on to?” I ask. “The fact that you don’t know what’s going on? You only got one thing out of three. Nice work, Sherlock Holmes.” “The clues don’t always come all at once,” he says. “I’m a third of the way there.” Read more →

My Family’s Guide to Failure

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At a recent family gathering, someone whom I won’t name here recommended to my son, a high school senior, that he start looking for a community college to attend for a couple of years before transferring to a four-year school. “That’s a good idea,” I said. “Do you have any more good ideas? Maybe he should punch himself in the face really hard.” One of the things I love about my boy is that when he does something, he puts his heart into it. He takes on the risk of failure. The safe approach — and historically the preferred method in my family — is to do things indifferently, fail, then announce that you weren’t really trying and that you could have succeeded if you’d wanted to.” We have family members who — despite, to my knowledge, having never done or said an intelligent thing in their lives — never… Read more →

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