Mild Amusement

For reasons unknown to me, people in my life have occasionally asked if I was in the military. I once hypothesized that it had something to do with my gait . As it turns out, I now know why. Well, I have a better idea now. First, though, let me start by saying that I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I have enough respect for the members of the armed services ("home of the free because of the brave" comes to mind) that I am pleasantly surprised if people ask me this. However, I've never served in any kind of military branch. Hell, I've never even played on an organized sports team. However, this observation is not a coincidence. It has come up too many times, in too many ways, for it to be one person's wild imagination. No, it's come up surprisingly often: Vendors in a different continent entirely asked me out of the blue I briefly mentioned this in the linked blog post, but a few coworkers and I were walking around a look out point du...

I've mentioned before that I seem to enjoy teaching , to various degrees. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, since I never really imagined myself as a teacher. It's not exactly like I had visions of myself at a chalkboard with chalk in hand as a little boy. However, I've done various activities that have involved teaching people things over the years, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It's actually kind of fun most of the time. As with everything on this blog, though, it certainly leads to its share of laughs. For starters, I have a rule: "if you've got jokes, so do I." I've mentioned it briefly before (namely, in that blog post I linked at the beginning), but it leads to a surprising amount of banter with students. For the most part, it just sort of happens. Still, a couple of memorable examples come to mind: I always introduce myself to the class during the first session, but I don't give them my full life story. I tell them...

So, at some point, my friends and family decided to start something called " Wife Watch " for me. It was a joke, really, but my sister in law was trying to scope out potential partners for me. It was all quite amusing, since she and my brother could be quite brazen about all of this. Of course, that was over three years ago, so the people around me have had more time to add to the list of stories. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the latest edition of Wife Watch: The first entry goes to my sister in law, because of course it does. It was her idea from the beginning, so it should come as no surprise that she has another contribution to the list. This time, she thought that I might be interested in her coworker. Both she and said coworker live far enough away that it'd involve some planning to see them, but that was apparently a trivial detail/objection. In fact, when the two of them randomly happened to have lunch much closer to me, my sister in law practically ...

Over the course of writing these blog posts, I have touched upon several sliding scales that have come up in my every day life. Some of these are useful to measure dichotomies , like the opera-wife beater scale that my friend came up with to describe class versus crass. Others have been more useful as a means of trying to objectively measure various qualitative values. For example, banter with friends has led to formulas and scales to measure both how full someone really is and how much pain a guy is really in . To this day, though, I still think that the crazy scale was my favorite. If you can't be bothered to click the link to my old post, my brother basically came up with a way to measure how crazy he thought some of the Mild Ex'es were. There were categories, each category had a weight, and there was even a hotness factor thrown in to help determine how much crazy one should be willing to put up with. Basically, it was like another version of the crazy/hot scale from H...