Tag Archives: humour

Who I used to be

One of the funniest ‘athletes getting older’ stories I know is one of a former national water polo player who was somewhere around 60 years old and playing in a game against an enthusiastic teenager. The old guy swam into the hole (centre position) and the you scrappy kid was all over him. The ball came into the hole and the overactive kid fouls the old guy… a normal thing in the game of water polo, but the kid was a bit aggressive. After the foul the old guy looks back at the kid and says, “Hey, don’t you know who I used to be?”

It’s fair to say that I used to be an athlete. I played water polo at a high enough level, and trained hard enough to say so. And while I’m pretty fit now, and probably in better shape than 70-80% of people my age, I am not an athlete. I don’t say that disparagingly, but I don’t play any sports, and I’m very much past my prime. Where this comes into play is in my inability to really push myself.

I see it specifically in training certain muscles. I struggle to go past 80% effort. That’s the challenge point for me. If I really like an exercise, I remember how to push hard, but if I don’t like it, I struggle. I’ve lost that ‘athlete’s edge’ where I can push through the discomfort and really give my maximum effort at will.

That’s why I say I used to be an athlete. It’s not about the fitness, it’s not about feeling positive about how well I take care of myself (I do). It’s about the lack of ability to really push myself to a point past the threshold of discomfort that athletes can do every workout.

Maybe I’m just out of practice, and I need to have a sport as a reason to train? Maybe it’s that I’m more externally motivated and I need a team relying on me? Perhaps if I joined a gym and was surrounded by people I’d push myself more than I can training at home alone.

In any case, I know who I am now and who I used to be, and I’m good with that. I might have been an athlete, but now I’m a guy who wants to still be fit and healthy in 25 years. I don’t want to run a marathon, and I’m too crappy a swimmer and not willing to do the work to get back in the pool and play water polo again… but I am going to push where I can, be smart about how much weight I move around so I don’t hurt myself… and every now and then push to my max and remember who I used to be.

The photograph

Five unruly cousins on a park bench. Our uncle taking the photo. No chance of us all sitting quietly and smiling at the same time.

“Ok, here’s the deal,” my uncle says. “Pose for one nice one then I’ll let you do anything you want for the next picture.”

Here we are about 45 years later and only one of those pictures survived. Only one mattered enough to be blown up and framed. The smiles long faded to distant memory… but ‘anything you want’ was exactly want we wanted, and what we still want.

It’s amazing what you get when you let kids be kids.

The luxury of convenience

I had a chuckle today in the grocery store. A woman rushed by me, grabbed an item of of the shelf and keep going almost in a single motion. She was obviously in a hurry. She was also on her cell phone and the part of the conversation I caught was, …”Seriously, I wish our damn phones were still connected to our walls with a wire.” The irony of her saying this on a very portable phone wasn’t lost on me.

I then went to Starbucks and sat for a few minutes having a breakfast sandwich. Our local store is newly renovated and it both looks and feels really nice. They expanded the serving area without taking much seating away, and the order pickup area has a large section with the alphabet in 3 rows to help people find their order by name much faster. However, when I went to dispense my garbage I realized that the only recycling and disposal bins were at the back of the store next to the washrooms. This is not remotely convenient.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, when we were doing our main floor renovation last year, we knew we wanted a coffee station on the small counter next to our fridge. It wasn’t part of the original plan, but I requested a sink be added to the counter. I thought about how after the coffee has been pressed on our espresso machine, we would want to rinse out the portafilter, and it would be really inconvenient to walk this over to our kitchen sink about 15 feet away, while it dripped coffee. Between making coffees and rinsing out the wet cat food containers for our cat, there are days I use this sink more than the main kitchen sink.

 On a completely different topic, Zoom calls can be great to bring people together, when geography can be challenging, but it can also be a complete time suck with added opportunities for meetings to happen, when a memo or email would be faster. A memo instead of a Zoom call can free up a lot of time that a meeting can steal from the efficiency of a more productive day.

There’s no doubt that having a mobile phone provides considerable convenience compared to phones with a spiral cord connected to it, in a fixed location. But we can’t deny the distraction that these smart phones have created, taking time away from us. So their convenience comes with a fair bit of inconvenience as well. 

I think people often spend a lot of time thinking about how one thing can be convenient and through a lack of design thinking forget about how other things also need to be convenient. It is true that sometimes one convenience needs to be a sacrificed, and not everything can be equally as convenient. The new Starbucks layout is definitely more convenient for the employees, but they really missed the mark, making it less convenient for customers. That’s a luxury that shouldn’t be missed. 

Have the day you deserve

I like this little phrase. It’s simple, sharp, and sneaky.

Someone’s being a jerk to you? “Have the day you deserve.”

Someone is rude? “Have the day you deserve.”

Someone intentionally cuts you off in traffic? “Have the day you deserve.”

It’s a rather condescending phrase, but sometimes it’s just the right thing to say to a person who doesn’t deserve to be treated nicely.

I’ve never actually used this. I’ve mostly heard it used on TikTok’s when someone does a reaction video to a rude commenter. But it has a nice ring to it. Someone goes out of their way to be mean… what do you do? Don’t stoop to their level, don’t be rude, just tell them to have the day they deserve.

Unexpectedly clever

There is no such thing as a perfect worksheet, and students will often read a question and figure out an unintended way to answer it. Here are two clever responses… the difference being the teacher’s assessment.

I look at the first one and I can hear the Madagascar movie version of it in my head. The teacher states the obvious, “Not the answer I was looking for” and gives it a big red X.

It’s obvious in the second one that the answer also wasn’t what the teacher was looking for, but that teacher gave it a big red check mark and a star.

“Not what I was looking for” does not mean wrong.

A clever response may be unexpected, however whether it was an intentional circumvention of the intended outcome or just insightful and clever it deserves to be appreciated rather than marked incorrectly. In my books, both these kids deserve a star.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

I saw this film last night. Funny, dark, and thoroughly enjoyable. It’s hard to describe the humour. I think if Quentin Tarantino, Mell Brooks, and the Monty Python crew all got together and got high, this is the movie they would write and film.

I was driving home and laughed out loud at the origins backstory of hotdog fingers. Yes, you read that correctly.

This movie is an epic journey, and it will gain a cult-like following of fans. It definitely won’t be for everyone, but if you love an action film, filled with dark humour, you won’t want to miss this movie… And don’t wait for it to start streaming, go see it in a theatre to truly appreciate other people laughing at the absurdity of some of the scenes.

I don’t usually enjoy watching movies a second time. It takes a special movie for me to re-watch. This will be one of those movies.

Everything Everywhere All at Once gets a 10/10 from me.

Lowbrow comedy

There is all kinds of talk about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards because Chris told an insensitive joke about Will’s wife. I’m not going to discuss the issue of choosing a physical attack. I’m not going to judge, everyone seems to have an opinion, and no matter how you look at it, it could have been handled differently. But I am going to say that sometimes an extreme event needs to happen to change an unhealthy pattern.

For the last few years, comedians at these events have followed a pattern. They have all used the opportunity to get in front of famous people and roast them.They use their host position and their comedic skills to attack the audience. As Ricky Gervais said, “Let’s have a laugh at your expense, shall we? Remember, they’re just jokes. We are all going to die soon and there’s no sequel.”

The thing is, there have been many sequels. More and more, these award shows have become venues for jokes that are lowbrow attacks on famous people. They are funny in a disparaging way. They are hurtful. They are mean.

This isn’t the only kind of comedy. Being famous doesn’t give others permission to use this form of comedy.

This was not a good move by Will Smith. I’m a fan of his work and this is the most out of character thing I’ve ever seen him do. But maybe some good will come from this. Maybe hosts will try to be more highbrow with their comedy, and still be funny without attacking the audience. Funny doesn’t have to be at anyone’s expense. Funny doesn’t have to be mean.

Cone of silence

When I was a kid I used to watch Get Smart, a ridiculous comedy about a bumbling secret agent who seemed to always accidentally solved his case. Whenever his boss was going to tell him something top secret, Max, agent 99, would insist on using the cone of silence… a device that succeeded in preventing them from hearing each other, and could always be heard from the audience’s perspective, outside of the cone.

I sometimes try to put myself in a cone of silence, not watching the news, not paying attention to social media posts related to news events, not discussing anything related to the news. I try to block things out for a couple days and just live in blissful ignorance of the world beyond my daily life.

Does it work? Not always. But every now and then it’s fun to try.

Insightful comedy

Last night I went to see Trevor Noah live in Vancouver. My wife and I had a little escape from our house under renovation, and we enjoyed the weekend downtown. These tickets were bought months ago for my birthday, and this was the first large event gathering either of us have done in a couple years.

It felt weird to be around so many people, as I shared in this tweet about the Trevor’s ‘Back to Abnormal Tour’.

(Follow the link in the tweet here for a cute laugh.)

Watching the comedians, Trevor and his two clever lead-offs, it occurred to me that comedians are but a few people that can tread on hot topics without eliciting anger. They can broach topics and say things that would come off as inappropriate by anyone else, then they shed some insightful light on the topics. They can provide perspectives about hot topics while eliciting laughter instead of anger.

I don’t think we should live in a society where we need to rely on comedians to provide rational insight on hot topics. We should be able to have these conversations openly without name calling and yelling. But a couple hours before going to the show we were out for lunch, and on the way back to the hotel passed some anti-mask protesters. One of them was having an exchange with someone walking past. I have no idea who started it but they were both throwing F-bombs at each other. Nothing civil about that. Nothing insightful shared. Nothing funny about it.

A few hours later, I’m having a good laugh, listening to Trevor make insightful comments about topics others just bicker about. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of us could do that?

I can be prickly

It’s hard to admit to yourself that you are stubborn, but in some cases I really am. There are certain colours that I just don’t like. There are pieces of art I just can’t appreciate. There are things that annoy me that don’t bother other people. The thing is, I’m not usually apologetic about this kind of prickliness.

I think the only people that really notice this are my family and close friends. I’m not terribly vocal about it, well except for sharing it here, and it’s not like I launch into public rants about my dislikes. But if I own up to it, I can be a bit over the top and annoying about some pretty small things. I think my wife has to put up with this more than anyone else.

It can be hard to admit that I have these annoying idiosyncrasies, but I think for the most part it’s me being annoyed and I leave the rest of the world out of it. Still, I probably need to reflect on that a bit, and when I get prickly about something really insignificant, I need to take a breath and not take my unimportant concerns so seriously.

I don’t want to be that old guy that took the ‘ly’ off of prickly. 😜