Thursday, August 22, 2013

Giant Penis Growing Out of My Forehead

Wow.  Over three months since a blog.  Plenty of thoughts and experiences have occurred in that period that would have been worthy of summarizing and randomly posting on the internet for no one to read, but I just haven't been able to muster the effort.  But a few other long dormant bloggers have recently sprung back to life, and I'll follow their lead and spew some nonsensical clap trap of my own. 

I don't have many unshakeable convictions.  It might seem like I do with the way I act, but I really only stand up for ideas to the extent that I've thought them through and have convinced myself that they're right.  When I argue, even if I seem like I'm in total disagreement, I'm still incorporating opposing ideas, and often revisit them after the fact and rethink them from several different angles.  I sometimes find that they had more merit than I originally thought, and sometimes they change or develop my opinions on something only loosely related.  I don't live in the world I wish I did, I'm not the person I wish I was, and I have to come to terms with things I don't like and don't understand. 

It's along the lines of the previous paragraph that I've recently had to accept that fact that there's a giant penis growing out of my forehead.  I can't see it, but after carefully reconstructing the events of the last few months, I've come to the conclusion that it must be there, and I need to deal with it.  So be it.  It starts at home.  The last few months I've had the chance to spend a lot of time with my daughter.  The terrible twos are not a myth.  The interactions have been challenging, exhausting and sometimes maddening, and so I've been fairly analytical about how I'm dealing with this and how my parenting needs to evolve to deal with it all.  I'm very intentional with the way I explain things, the instructions I give, and my disciplinary approach.  Yet all I get back is That Look.  You know that look.  A mix of blank stare, confusion, horror, and disgust all rolled into one. 

My thoughtful approach has rolled into other areas of life too.  At track, we're working out at the lake during the summer, and I make an attempt to incorporate a full variety of trails into each workout.  I draw a map, mark the beginning and end of intervals, color code it with effort levels and arrows showing the direction, post a written description a few days before the workout and then describe the workout in detail immediately before it starts.  The invariable response of each of the 20-30 faces who show up every week?  That Look. 

At work, after carefully preparing and presenting my thoughts, whether on technical project issues or more general discussions, the response to my ideas is the same.  That Look. 

I've greatly enjoyed the media shit storms of the past few months.  Zimmerman.  Snowden.  Riley Cooper.  Bob Filner.  Not so much the incidents themselves, but people's reactions and opinions on the matter.  I don't actively engage people on these issues, but in the few cases where I've been asked and have had the opportunity to give my carefully balanced thoughts on these circuses, almost impossibly, the response has simply been That Look

So, thoughtful analysis being my bag baby, I took to trying to understand why I've been getting That Look with such shocking consistency.  The more I thought and the more explanations I considered, the more it boiled down to one simple, inescapable conclusion.  Giant penis growing out of forehead.  Nothing else makes sense.  It's not an easy reality to accept, but I can't let the fact that I can't see it let me ignore the overwhelming evidence from the outside any longer.  Time to move forward and figure out a way to not let this massive cranio-phallus deprive the world from my crystal clear communication skills any longer.  It's a challenge I think I'm up to. 

I also wonder if there should be a separate division for me when I yog in OTCYs.  I bet I'd dominate.