I got an Email a couple of months ago inviting me to a reunion of all the guys from my old scout troop--they were getting together the ones who had earned Eagle Scout, the highest award you can get. It turns out that there have been over 200 Eagle Scouts from the troop that I belonged to as a kid--the troop is now 30 years old, and I was around and knew some of the founding members, so I felt that it was a pretty significant thing. In looking at the list, I was Eagle Scout #12 or so, so the fact that there were 200 guys that came after me was also intriguing. Over the years, I have lost touch with everyone I knew from those days. In fact, I get out my old patches every once in a while for Ryan to look at, but overall, I've just lost touch with scouts and scouting.
My reason for not getting continuing to embrace scouting is very simple, and probably offensive to some: Women and their increased involvement in the program. Somehow, they kicked their way into scouting and changed the landscape--there seems to be very heavy female involvement in Scouting now, and I'm not sure it is for the better. About a year ago, when my brother was putting together a hike for our family, I went to a scout meeting to get some hiking trail information. I walked into the lobby of the meeting room and was eyed venomously by three cud-chewing cows with greater hate in their eyes than a vengeful Grendel's mother--in full Boy Scout regalia, no less. It was really creepy. During the meeting, the shrill shrieking of women's voices wrapped around my skull and pierced my spine, kinda like "Predator" monster ripping my vertabrae out. It was absolutely unbearable and I started to feel dizzy. I felt like I was regressing and had the urge to go home and mow the yard and mop the kitchen before dad came home.
Some people probably call it "good old day" syndrome--and I have to tell you that it was pretty unfair to guys who didn't have a dad at home that they didn't have an adult who could participate with them in the program, but scouting was a place where you could go camping and hang out and do stuff without someone really caring if you are wearing clean socks--in fact, nobody really cared if you wore clothes at all. The men running the place only got involved if they thought you were going to wind up in the hospital...or morgue--if they didn't intervene.
I picked up Time magazine the other day and there was a commentary on gay adoption and parenting. It was by Dr. James Dobson, who is more socially conservative than the prophet Ezekiel. So, it wasn't shocking that the argument was a case against gay anything. Not surprising, because the tone of the conservative branch of this nation seems to be "if you're gay, we aren't going to reward it in any way whatsoever--you aren't allowed to have fun in the same way that straight people can." Without getting too far into condemning or approving of the lifestyle, suffice it to say that I'm not in a position to be judgemental about anyone else's life (doesn't always stop me).
The surprising thing about the article in Time was that it makes a pretty good argument on why kids need a dad--it rang a bell. Here's what it said: "Fathers don't 'Mother'".
When I read that, I thought, "Yeah, that's really it." It reminded me of a (minor) constant issue between Fran and me about the kids--probably more Ryan than Kaitlyn at this point. She unapologetically supports him and reassures him, and I sometimes allow him to endure a little (and even administer) "trial by fire." It's probably easier to see from a distance, but I would rather him learn tough lessons about procrastinating and missing out on opportunities when it's around the house than when he's 20 and in college, or about not paying attention to things and ruining a $10 model than a $10,000 car. Sometimes Fran can't stand to see him fail or get discouraged, but I think that it's a part of learning. She sometimes insinuates that it is a little cruel to let him fail. For now, I can be there to pick him up, comfort him, and build him back up, as well as point out the lesson to be learned. I've seen the product of over-parenting and those horrid kids with a glorified sense of entitlement seem to make horrid adults with the same odious attitude.
Back to the Eagle Scout reunion. I went, and it was kind of neat. There were lots of guys from the "old days", including one guy who lived three doors down from our house when we were growing up--I always had looked up to him, because he was three years older. Time was a great, equalizer, though, because he was a completely bald, nerdy guy with a high-pitched whiny voice like a cartoon character and a very disconnected conversation style. There was another really weird experience--I mentioned to one of the guys that I saw his mother at the car wash the other day, and we figured out that she had died suddenly within days of my seeing her. I could tell that it really had shaken him up that I had seen her.
But the thing that really struck me was that, during my time in the troop, we went ten years and only had twenty Eagle scouts. It was really a badge of honor and represented an accomplishment--lots of learning, independent study, and a relatively complex work project that the guy had to design, plan, and organize. In 2006, the troop graduated twenty Eagles scouts! The youngest one was born in 1991 (which was when I bought my last pair of hiking boots)!
During the weekend, it came out that the women in leadership in the troup had formed a committee to push the boys through the program to successfully accomplish their Eagle Scout award. Once they got within a certain distance of the endpoint, these women would badger them about getting their requirements completed, their project planned, their paperwork filed, and drive the whole process. One of the women got up and told a story about one of the guys who was just going t blow off getting his award, and she arranged for him to have a special meeting, and helped him organize his paperwork and get his stuff together--she didn't mention if she wiped his butt and/or nose before the meeting. It really bugged me, and then I backlashed and got mad at myself for being so sexist--why don't I just start up a "he-man woman-hater's club"?
But there is a certain "get up off your ass and do it" quality that these guys should have in order to be highly commended and recognized for perhaps their whole life, and it seemed, sadly, like they weren't left alone to discover that trait in themselves. The award is not the end in mind--the process of accomplishing things on your own is the intention of the program. The "mothering" instinct is a strong one, though--these women see the shame and failure of not accomplishing something that is set out for, and they can't trust their boys to their own devices.
This seemed obvious to me in the slight generational gap which existed in the group--at one point, where there stopped being 3 or 4 representatives of a "class year" and started being 12 or 13, it was rare to see a true stand-out guy.
My humble opinion.
23 January 2007
16 January 2007
I've Lost it!
So far, I've started this entry five different times. I mean, on five different days. Then, disgusted, I just exited out without saving. I think I've just forgotten how to write--lost my touch. I think you can really lose it, and start copping out a little. The issue isn't filling a space, but putting something together that is actually enjoyable to read.
Here's an example: One of my entries was all a concerted effort to tell a funny anecdote that happened about 10 years ago. Only, when I read it written out, it was one of those "Hey, well you just had to be there" things. Uh...that's the point of writing, isn't it? If you finish reading something and think "I guess you just had to be there..." then whoever is writing it really sucks at capturing the mood.
Here's the anecdote: A friend of mine got a new girlfriend who was really annoying. Not sure why, but he got really wrapped up in her and they would sit in the corner whispering to each other all the time. And the girl was ugly in several ways, including a very snobby attitude, which was the most significant way. So, yes, I realize that when you get a new girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever it naturally takes you away from your buddies and there is a reshuffling of positions and time allotment, but this was getting just rude and irritating. At a weak moment, I referred to the couple collectively as "'Muskrat Love' over there whispering in the corner...", which is a reference to an obscure, crappy, '70's song which is somewhat funny in it's own little, obscure existence.
That's it--there's my un-funny anectdote/obscure reference. When I made it up, it seemed to be very funny to everyone who heard it, particularly those of us who remembered the crappy song, but now it's just a little pathetic story. The couple broke up but I still think about Muskrat Love when I see ugly people huddled with each other in a corner whispering or even sometimes just when I see this friend.
Well, you just had to be there...trust me, it was funny.
I was going to work it into a story about waking up in the morning during the holidays and cooking French toast for everyone. I've got this great recipe and I love to make a big batch of it and freeze a few pieces so we can heat it for Ryan in Fran's beloved toaster oven before he scurries off to school in the dark--so he can have a hot breakfast, which is important to Fran.
I had a few pieces of bread left over, especially the "heels", which Fran obscurely calls the "stumps". Anyway, I had a bag full of these pieces, and decided that it would be fun to take the kids to a nearby park to feed the ducks. I remember always loving to do that as a kid. I took my camera, and was delighted that the light was really interesting that day--it was somewhat chilly and very overcast, and the light was a very flat color and looked pretty on the water (the power lines ruin this picture, though). When I got home, I sheepishly acknowledged to my incredulous wife that I got 40 pictures of swans, ducks, geese, dirt, and brown water, but somehow none of them included the kids...This part of the story was supposed to portray me as an absentminded artistic genius...
But we had a really nice time feeding the ducks. Two huge swans came over to us, and they were pretty much insatiable--they even chased away most of the ducks and geese. I had to explain to Kaitlyn that she didn't actually have to go into the water to feed the swans, and Ryan was trying out his fastball straight at the poor, exiled ducks' heads ten yards away.
Then we looked up, and there was a big, fluffy beaver-looking rodent about three feet from my two-year-old. I ran over and scooped her up and she exclaimed "Look at that Humongous Mouse, Daddy!" I laughed so hard that I almost dropped her. Ryan began to feed it bread, and we both noticed that it had very odd-looking, huge, bright orange teeth in the front--perhaps from chewing wood--I don't know, but it was weird. It must come over sometimes when people feed the ducks, because we didn't seem to scare it at all, and it was chomping on the offering of bread that Ryan had piled in front of it. The swans, growing jealous, started hissing at it. But the tail was long and skinny like a rat's tail, so it wasn't a beaver.
I went home and looked it up in the Texas wildlife guide--it was a muskrat, which are known to live in this area (I guess it doesn't take a wildlife biologist to report that they exist--you can spot them huddled together in corners of the forest). Somehow, in the hands of a more skilled writer, this could be turned into a humorous and technically clean story, but you'll have to clomp through my muddy description here (and, ironically, without a picture of the muskrat, which I forgot to snap with a squirmy 2-year-old around my neck).
And there it is--my first entry in a while...I'm not deleting it.
Here's an example: One of my entries was all a concerted effort to tell a funny anecdote that happened about 10 years ago. Only, when I read it written out, it was one of those "Hey, well you just had to be there" things. Uh...that's the point of writing, isn't it? If you finish reading something and think "I guess you just had to be there..." then whoever is writing it really sucks at capturing the mood.
Here's the anecdote: A friend of mine got a new girlfriend who was really annoying. Not sure why, but he got really wrapped up in her and they would sit in the corner whispering to each other all the time. And the girl was ugly in several ways, including a very snobby attitude, which was the most significant way. So, yes, I realize that when you get a new girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever it naturally takes you away from your buddies and there is a reshuffling of positions and time allotment, but this was getting just rude and irritating. At a weak moment, I referred to the couple collectively as "'Muskrat Love' over there whispering in the corner...", which is a reference to an obscure, crappy, '70's song which is somewhat funny in it's own little, obscure existence.
That's it--there's my un-funny anectdote/obscure reference. When I made it up, it seemed to be very funny to everyone who heard it, particularly those of us who remembered the crappy song, but now it's just a little pathetic story. The couple broke up but I still think about Muskrat Love when I see ugly people huddled with each other in a corner whispering or even sometimes just when I see this friend.
Well, you just had to be there...trust me, it was funny.
I was going to work it into a story about waking up in the morning during the holidays and cooking French toast for everyone. I've got this great recipe and I love to make a big batch of it and freeze a few pieces so we can heat it for Ryan in Fran's beloved toaster oven before he scurries off to school in the dark--so he can have a hot breakfast, which is important to Fran.
I had a few pieces of bread left over, especially the "heels", which Fran obscurely calls the "stumps". Anyway, I had a bag full of these pieces, and decided that it would be fun to take the kids to a nearby park to feed the ducks. I remember always loving to do that as a kid. I took my camera, and was delighted that the light was really interesting that day--it was somewhat chilly and very overcast, and the light was a very flat color and looked pretty on the water (the power lines ruin this picture, though). When I got home, I sheepishly acknowledged to my incredulous wife that I got 40 pictures of swans, ducks, geese, dirt, and brown water, but somehow none of them included the kids...This part of the story was supposed to portray me as an absentminded artistic genius...
But we had a really nice time feeding the ducks. Two huge swans came over to us, and they were pretty much insatiable--they even chased away most of the ducks and geese. I had to explain to Kaitlyn that she didn't actually have to go into the water to feed the swans, and Ryan was trying out his fastball straight at the poor, exiled ducks' heads ten yards away.
Then we looked up, and there was a big, fluffy beaver-looking rodent about three feet from my two-year-old. I ran over and scooped her up and she exclaimed "Look at that Humongous Mouse, Daddy!" I laughed so hard that I almost dropped her. Ryan began to feed it bread, and we both noticed that it had very odd-looking, huge, bright orange teeth in the front--perhaps from chewing wood--I don't know, but it was weird. It must come over sometimes when people feed the ducks, because we didn't seem to scare it at all, and it was chomping on the offering of bread that Ryan had piled in front of it. The swans, growing jealous, started hissing at it. But the tail was long and skinny like a rat's tail, so it wasn't a beaver.
I went home and looked it up in the Texas wildlife guide--it was a muskrat, which are known to live in this area (I guess it doesn't take a wildlife biologist to report that they exist--you can spot them huddled together in corners of the forest). Somehow, in the hands of a more skilled writer, this could be turned into a humorous and technically clean story, but you'll have to clomp through my muddy description here (and, ironically, without a picture of the muskrat, which I forgot to snap with a squirmy 2-year-old around my neck).
And there it is--my first entry in a while...I'm not deleting it.
05 January 2007
Hi There, it's still me...
Tomorrow is the second anniversary of my blog. 374 total posts for an average of about one every other day. Of course, when I first started out I was a little manic about the whole thing and sometimes posted three times a day for a while. That's just the way I do stuff, sometimes.
I think over the past month I've really blown the average--I haven't really looked, but I feel like I've just posted once or twice in the past 30 days. Sometimes I feel like the guy getting caught and eaten alive by the alien--"just kill me!" (I'm referring to my blog here, not myself for all you literal types and/or Ted Bundy types).
The travel schedule went nuts there for a while--Arizona (woo hoo!) and then California (left Texas at 29 degrees and landed in California at 78 degrees--didn't want to go back except that's where all my stuff is...like: wife, kids...).
Lots of weird travel stories--I'll just have to catch up on them later. Funny things came from the San Diego trip especially--the first cab driver I had who was having a nervous breakdown or something--he acted very erratically. In the end, he parked the cab, popped the trunk and wouldn't tell me how much I owed, or get out and get my bags, which is really, really weird. After I retrived my bags, I figured how much I owed myself from the meter, fished out a bill and asked for a receipt, which he slowly filled out completely for about three minutes. Then, he wouldn't accept a tip (which I thought I was being VERY generous in giving at all). Weird.
The driver taking me to the airport was obsessed with talking about the Russian spy who was killed via radiation poisoning. A little bit of a downer, but intriguing. I asked him if he was from Russia and he told me he was from Bulgaria. I brought up Georgi Markov , a Bulgarian who was also killed in London (rough place, eh?) by the KGB, who supposedly injected ricin into him with an umbrella as he waited at a bus stop. I don't know why, but that's kind of a cool spy story to me... After being disgusted for being mistaken for Russian, the driver was at least impressed that I knew that story and that Markov was Bulgarian.
And I got hit on while riding on the plane--no, not buy a woman, but by one of those "hey, are you looking for an opportunity?" guys. A woman would have been easier to say no to--this guy actually has my Email address now and has been sending me very nice messages and wants to get together some morning to discuss his company with me. Here's a hint: I wasn't feeling well on the plane (allergies/stuffiness + pressure change = misery) , and he told me that he's been feeling great since he started taking some herbal supplements....
Well, I'll catch up on some other stuff later, including: Evil Quack dentist from Hell, Fran-tom of the Opera, and the gift orgy which is Christmas in my home. In the meantime, I'm smiling and I hope everyone out there reading is, too...
I think over the past month I've really blown the average--I haven't really looked, but I feel like I've just posted once or twice in the past 30 days. Sometimes I feel like the guy getting caught and eaten alive by the alien--"just kill me!" (I'm referring to my blog here, not myself for all you literal types and/or Ted Bundy types).
The travel schedule went nuts there for a while--Arizona (woo hoo!) and then California (left Texas at 29 degrees and landed in California at 78 degrees--didn't want to go back except that's where all my stuff is...like: wife, kids...).
Lots of weird travel stories--I'll just have to catch up on them later. Funny things came from the San Diego trip especially--the first cab driver I had who was having a nervous breakdown or something--he acted very erratically. In the end, he parked the cab, popped the trunk and wouldn't tell me how much I owed, or get out and get my bags, which is really, really weird. After I retrived my bags, I figured how much I owed myself from the meter, fished out a bill and asked for a receipt, which he slowly filled out completely for about three minutes. Then, he wouldn't accept a tip (which I thought I was being VERY generous in giving at all). Weird.
The driver taking me to the airport was obsessed with talking about the Russian spy who was killed via radiation poisoning. A little bit of a downer, but intriguing. I asked him if he was from Russia and he told me he was from Bulgaria. I brought up Georgi Markov , a Bulgarian who was also killed in London (rough place, eh?) by the KGB, who supposedly injected ricin into him with an umbrella as he waited at a bus stop. I don't know why, but that's kind of a cool spy story to me... After being disgusted for being mistaken for Russian, the driver was at least impressed that I knew that story and that Markov was Bulgarian.
And I got hit on while riding on the plane--no, not buy a woman, but by one of those "hey, are you looking for an opportunity?" guys. A woman would have been easier to say no to--this guy actually has my Email address now and has been sending me very nice messages and wants to get together some morning to discuss his company with me. Here's a hint: I wasn't feeling well on the plane (allergies/stuffiness + pressure change = misery) , and he told me that he's been feeling great since he started taking some herbal supplements....
Well, I'll catch up on some other stuff later, including: Evil Quack dentist from Hell, Fran-tom of the Opera, and the gift orgy which is Christmas in my home. In the meantime, I'm smiling and I hope everyone out there reading is, too...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
