Razors

When I was about sixteen and headed off to a high school dance with a date … which means it was probably a prom … my Dad stopped me and told me I should shave before I went.   In a town that was largely Italian, I may have been two or three years past the usual first-shave age, but I was thrilled none-the-less.   Every boy wants to be a man until they’ve tried it for 20 or 30 years, at which point he realizes how much fun being a boy was.   My first shave was with my Dad’s electric razor.   As my beard thickened, I got my own Gillette double-edged safety razor, just like Dad’s.   You may not know that King Camp Gillette was the inventor of the disposable double-edged blade and was the supplier of safety razors to American troops during World War I.  Because GIs were allowed to keep their razors when the war was over, Gillette had a guaranteed customer base for his blades, making Gillette the dominant force in shaving supplies.

The Committee in My Head

Have you ever heard someone speak of The Committee in My Head as a way of describing the assortment of thoughts that can seem to appear out of nowhere in your mind, especially in difficult situations?  As you’ve tried to reason your way though such a situation, have you been surprised by the unproductive and sometimes downright nasty  thoughts that turn up?  According to Barry Gordon in an article in Scientific American, We are aware of a tiny fraction of the thinking that goes on in our minds, and we can control only a tiny part of our conscious thoughts. The vast majority of our thinking efforts goes on subconsciously. Only one or two of these thoughts are likely to breach into consciousness at a time. And if that isn’t bad enough news for those of us who would like to be clear and rational thinkers, Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner says that vigilantly struggling not to think about something or someone forces part of your brain to be on guard for that thought. Holding it there, even subconsciously, keeps the thought alive, and sometimes it escapes out of the prison it’s being kept in and erupts into your active thoughts. This is mostly likely to happen when you’re under stress, mentally overwhelmed or just plain exhausted.   So, if we can’t control our thoughts … and trying can actually make doing so harder … what is an over-thinker to do?

As If

I have a good friend who, when asked how he’s doing often says, I’m living the dream.  He usually says it with a twinkle in his eye and during the course of our time together, he’ll tell me what’s really going on, be it the dream or not.  They call that Fake it ’til you make it in my men’s meetings.   Another friend told me he’d had a Terrific Tuesday and when I gave him  a questioning look, he said, Don’t you believe in Acting As If?   It’s that old notion that if you want your life to be a certain way, act as if it’s already that way until it happens. Do I believe it?  That depends.

Throwback Thursday – Bright Lights

Here it is, the first Thursday of (gasp) 2016.  That makes my birth year, 1944, sound like is was very long ago.  Yes, I know.  It was. So for the first Throwback Thursday of the year, I’m reposting an anecdote that happened on the day of my birth.

One of the treasures I saved from my father’s house when he moved to assisted living is a letter my Mom wrote from Casper, WY, where my father was stationed at the Army Air Corps Heavy Bomber Training Unit.  The letter begins, Dear Mother and Dad, This is an extra special important letter so I’ll send it to the two of you  (You’d best sit down, Mom).  It continues, You two have been married too long to be just Mom and Dad.  Don’t you think it’s time you were Grandma and Grampa?  My Mom was telling her parents that she was four and a half months pregnant with me.  Of course, they didn’t know I was me yet, so they’d nicknamed me Stinky, Jr.  Thank goodness that it was Buddy that eventually stuck as my nickname.  The letter says, I hope we do have a boy … with blue eyes and a dimple in its chin … not the other end like me.  Hmm.  I have brown eyes, by the way.   In the letter, my Mom went on to ask if it was OK for her to come home and live with her Mom and Dad while my Dad was shipped overseas to Italy to fight the war.   I’ll have a Pullman all the way home, she said … for free, too.  The Army was paying.  Trains played a big part in my Mom’s travels when she and Dad were first married.   There was even a running family joke that my real Dad was a porter.  All you have to do is see a picture of my Dad and I together and you’ll know the truth.

Monday Smiles – 11/2/2015

A generalist is someone who learns less and less about more and more until he knows absolutely nothing about everything.  A specialist learns less and less about more and more until he knows absolutely everything about nothing – Unknown

I like to think I walk the middle ground between knowing nothing about everything and everything about nothing but in my  vocation, I am definitely a specialist.  Starting out in what was already a specialized field, electrical engineering, almost 20 years of higher education has narrowed my field until it is likely that most people wouldn’t understand my resume.  Adaptive beamforming.  LMS noise cancellation.  Eigenvalue analysis. See?  But almost fifty years experience in those corners of the world make me valuable to others who use such things in their business.   Some years ago, when business with my company was slow, I registered with an expert placement company.  The company maintains a database of resumes across a wide range of fields on line.  Professionals needing the support of specialists they don’t need often enough to employ full time can find the professional support they need by searching the database using online tools.   The work is usually very interesting but it brings a degree of pressure with in that clients expect an expert to provide innovative solutions in a relatively short time.  I’ve supported attorneys in patent cases, evaluated products for potential buyers and applied some of the techniques I’ve learned in military systems to commercial products.

Throwback Thursday – Saved by The Twist

So, here we are on Throwback Thursday, where I get to post some of my old favorites from Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog.   Older Eyes wasn’t always as confident and cosmopolitan as he is at 71.  He once was a shy high school boy and an FSW.  A what, you say?  Read on – originally posted in February of 2014.

When I was a Freshman in high school, my Mother signed me up for dance lessons.  I really don’t remember how that came about.  It was true that at school dances, I was a Fast-Song-Wallflower, sitting with the other FSWs until the DJ played a slow song.  There were only two dance steps you needed to know to dance every song … Slow Dancing and the Bop.   Slow Dancing was just walking in circles with a girl in your arms … even I could do that.  The Bop mystified me.  Then again, I am to this day a deliberate learner of dance steps. My wife, Muri, could walk onto a floor and be dancing a new line dance in a few minutes while I was still mumbling, What was that fourth move? So, it’s possible I told my Mom that I needed to learn to dance and she signed me up. Possible. My Inner Adolescent tells me that she was afraid her brainy son was going to be a social misfit and decided to enroll me on her own. Surprise, surprise there was a girl from my homeroom in my dance class. Because I considered her one of the popular girls, I was embarrassed. It never occurred to me to ask myself, Why is she here if she’s so popular?

Not Just Monday

I need to write today even though I have been neglecting Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog for over a month.  I need to write something to make me cry, to stop holding at bay the sadness I am feeling over the loss of a friend.   My son’s Siamese cat, Mr.P. has been missing for three days now.  He’s always been a little escape artist, waiting for an open door to slip away on an adventure in the great outdoors.   In the past, he’s always returned within a day, usually slipping in through the patio door left open for his return.  The hills around our home in Anaheim Hills are full of interesting creatures for a feline to stalk but they are also home to larger predators, like coyotes.   With each passing hour, our hope that Mr. P will come home fades.  It’s just a cat, Older Eyes, and not even yours, you may be thinking.  Well, for one, he isn’t just a cat and for two, I’ve loved him as if he was mine.

There IS a Free Lunch!

One of the great advantages of being a self-employed consultant is the flexibility to work both where and when I want.  When can be virtually any time that inspiration strikes … or, other times, when a deadline looms.   Where is frequently at a picnic table in Yorba Regional Park.  Yesterday, our housekeeper, Eva, was cleaning our house so I came to the park fully intending to spend most of the day.   I set up my office away from the office at a picnic table in one of the shelters near Lake Number 3.  I travel with a backpack that weighs about 40 pounds and when I’m spread out, my array of electronics (from laptop to bluetooth speaker and a camera just in case one of the park denizens stops by for a photo op) covers most of a table.   I was busy writing an email to a friend when a van parked nearby.  Suddenly I was surrounded by about 30 people.   There was a time I would have said old people but I’m less inclined to do that since at 71 I’m clearly in the club.  From the van, I could see they were from the Town and Country Manor, a retirement facilty, and it was pretty clear they were setting up for a picnic lunch.   Kidding, I said, If you want to have lunch in my office, you’ll have to feed me.   That got a few chuckles and appreciative smiles.  Then I went about my business while they set up table cloths and a food table.

A while later, someone came by and offered me lunch. I was only kidding, I said, I’m fine. Then someone asked again, saying there was plenty of food.   So I had a lunch of fried chicken, baked beans and potato salad while I chatted with several ladies who stopped by to comment on my electronics or ask what I was doing.   I helped one woman get her digital camera working.  Just because we’re old, she said, doesn’t mean we can’t use electronics.  Amen.  One woman mentioned how nice it was to be able to walk around the park at her age.  Ever politically incorrect, I asked how old she was.  She was 75.  I’m 71, I said.   You don’t look it, she replied.  My wife assures me she was flattering me and if so, it worked.   When a gaggle of Egyptian Geese swam by and someone said, Look at the baby ducks, I politely corrected them and they appreciated the information.  By the time lunch was over, they were calling me Bud and I was one of them.

It occurred to me that I would like to post about the experience so I showed them my blog on my laptop and asked a director if it would be OK.  She talked to everyone and they said yes.  It is a perfect subject for Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog because it highlights one of the best things about getting older.   I become part of a community that is, for the most part, kinder, quieter and more appreciative of the small things in life, like a beautiful day in the park.   My new friends were a reminder of just that.   As they were leaving, several stopped by to tell me what a wonderful place Town and Country Manor is to retire.  But I already knew that from watching the faces and the interactions of the people who happened to stop by for lunch in my office.  You can read about Town and Country here.

Seven. One.

Today, I am turning 71 years old.  How the heck did that come about?  Just a few years ago (six, to be exact), I was starting Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog with a post called Feeling Old in which I complained about the growing reminders of my age and the specter of the limited number of years left.  At seventy-one there are more reminders and fewer years.  The theme of Older Eyes was to be Reflections from an Older Perspective, a commentary on aging, both the negatives and the positives.  The scale seems to be shifting but I consider myself a lucky man to be able to say that the positives still outweigh the negatives.   So, I thought on this occasion of my (gasp) seventy-first birthday, I’d have a little fun with the number seventy-one, mostly courtesy my favorite blogging reference, Wikipedia.

Monday Smiles – 2/23/2015

Here it is, almost 4:30 p.m. and I have not been out of the house, which means … since I mostly work at home … that I have not been out of the office.  The office, of course, at this stage of my life is wherever I am working.  After breakfast and spending some time catching up on the news on my tablet. I dragged my trusty laptop (still preferable to my tablet for real work) to the kitchen table and spent the morning reviewing material for a legal case on which I am employed as an expert.  It is the nature of that business that there are long breaks as attorneys negotiate or await the results of mediation, long breaks during which I forget some of the details of the case.  Now, mediation has failed and the case will go to trial, so I am rereading statements I wrote months ago to remind me of what I knew back then.  I spent the afternoon doing the same thing in my office.  There are thousands of pages of documents and even more information online to be considered.  I am missing a beautiful sunny Socal day.  This case has come back to life just as the largest job my partner and I have ever won is starting.  I am likely to be working more hours than I planned.   I never expected to be working this much as I navigate the second half of my seventieth year, and my age also means that I am required to withdraw money from my IRA this year.  I could get hammered on my taxes.