Month: May 2016

Annoyed for the sake of being annoyed

Post author By Mike Gibbons
Post date May 26, 2016
No Comments on Annoyed for the sake of being annoyed

There are lots of things people get annoyed at. If you took a poll in my household, you’d find that 75 percent of respondents said, “Uh, yeah, like, everything.”

So, sure. I get annoyed at things. Some of them are plenty justified, even if some of those in the previously mentioned poll don’t get why I hate seeing people chew gum

But some things that the general masses tend to get annoyed at? Well, maybe we as a whole should stop getting peeved by them. And if you think I am going to mention not returning shopping carts to the proper corral, I am not. Because that is still a crime against humanity and always will be.

Some of the things we get annoyed at other people doing, though, really don’t impact us at all. (Gum chewing is not one of those. It’s gross.) So, a few things we as a society can stop getting our collective knickers in a twist about:

Selfies – Long before digital cameras, my wife and I used to take selfies all the time. And it didn’t bother anybody. The fun of getting our film back to see if the pictures came out with our entire faces in the picture AND the waterfall in back? Good times. Just because cell phones have made the experience instantaneous isn’t a reason to get all huffy. It’s other people having a good time. It doesn’t really affect you.
Taking pictures of your food – Again, long before the digital age, we loved sharing tales of our great meals we had. I have a friend who I routinely trade meal pics with, as she is a food lover, and loves to talk about good eats. Had we known each other 20 years ago, we would have had great discussions about an awesome meal in person. Now, thanks to technology, that conversation can be immediate, regardless of distance.
Everyone at the table being on their phone during dinner at a restaurant – Granted, this is a slippery slope. If every family meal is just a group of people on their cell phones talking to other people, that’s a problem. But sometimes, said family is on hour 8 of the last leg of a family road trip, and they’ve stopped at a Cracker Barrel just to get some grub and, quite frankly, they’ve had all the family time they can stomach. Everyone to their cyber corners.
Parents not disciplining their unruly kids behavior in public – As a parent, one of the worst times in your life is when your child is acting like a deranged alien in public. My kids are teens now, so the worst I’m going to get in public these days is brooding. But with younger kids, especially, when a temper tantrum starts going full force in public, the parent has my complete sympathy. Sure, they may be a horrible parent. But chances are, they are a fine parent, just trying to get out of the grocery with the paper towels and the dog food. While some folks would like to see the full force of parental vengeance come down on the kid for everyone to see, the truth of the matter is, most parents are far more mortified than you are annoyed. Public beatings aren’t really going to cure any ills.
Taking pictures at historical monuments – I live in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. And plenty of local folks take great joy in mocking people for taking pictures of historic houses or at historic sites. Also, I’ve seen numerous internet posts of people rolling their internet eyes at folks at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, taking the old “propping up the Tower” picture. But those tourists? It’s the only time they’re there. That’s their memory. Lighten up.

Now, there are some things you can still get annoyed at. Vague Facebook posts, not thanking someone for letting you in while driving, chewing gum in my house. But so many things you have to ask yourself, are you being annoyed for the sake being annoyed? Maybe you should just let other people live their lives, and care less about what they’re doing and more about what you can be doing in life. Such as putting up your shopping cart.

Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, he now lives in Charleston. You can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.

Childhood

The imperfect season

You know how sports movies go. The underdog triumphs, against all odds.

So you can imagine my reaction when my son’s lacrosse team, winless in the regular season, took a 1-0 lead in the first round of the postseason.

They could actually do this. Get their first win. In. The. Playoffs. Cue the triumphant music!

And then the other team scored 12 straight goals. Let’s turn the music off.

So not every season has a Hollywood ending.

It was a tough season. They fought hard and lost a couple of close ones. They fought hard and lost by more than a touchdown a few times, which if you know that scoring in lacrosse goes by single goals and not touchdowns, you know that’s not a good thing.

The worst part of the season, though, was not the losing. Although that wasn’t fun. My son is 13 and well beyond the “just have fun no matter what” age. Winning is fun. Losing is not.

What I hated to see was several of the boys on the team quit because they were losing. (In middle school hallways, just a hunch they didn’t say, “I quit because my team is not good.” Pretty sure they said something in placed of “is not good.”

By the playoff game, they were down to one substitute. The other team, by my estimate, had roughly 400 kids to sub out, and several of them were larger than I am.

I get that it was a tough season to stomach. Wasn’t a whole lot of fun to watch most nights. All of us parents in the bleachers would trade these, “Yikes…” looks back and forth as we started off a game suddenly down 3-0 with only two minutes gone.

But I am proud of those boys who stuck with it and played through the very last minute of a grueling season. And I feel sorry for those boys who quit on the team. Because they also quit on themselves.

Hate to break it to teenagers, but this is the easy part of life. Sure, there are a lot of things about being a teenager that seem absolutely awful, from the awkwardness of growing up to acne to the current popular music.

When you quit when things are tough, you’ll never know how sweet victory tastes. I’ve played on a lot of sports teams in my life, some really good, some really bad. Had I not experienced the 0-for-the-season teams, I would not have enjoyed the championship seasons nearly as much.

But also now is when you learn how to lose, and it’s bigger than sports. Because you will lose in life. Lots. And if you develop the attitude that when you’re losing, you’ll just take your ball and go home? Boy does life have some unpleasant surprises for you.

Building character through a losing season starts you on a path to be able to endure the tougher losses that come in life. And I’m not talking about rec league lacrosse. I’m talking about real losses and real failures. Think you can just quit every time life’s a little rough and just move on? Think again. Some losses are permanent. You will have wanted a little taste of disappointment and powering through it. You don’t run a marathon without doing lots of training beforehand.

In the closing minute of the season, the team down 12-1, the boys kept fighting. They charged the goal hard, and one of the kids got free, whipped his stick and zipped one past the goalie. 12-2. The team cheered and hugged. The lone sub joined them on the field. Team. Fighting. Together.

They lost 13-2. At the end, they lined up for what is always my favorite part of youth sports — the good game, good game, good game handshake.

This is probably the last sports team my son will play on. He’s at the age now where the kids are moving on to very competitive levels, and while he enjoys sports, I don’t think he wants to devote the time it takes to be on that next level. He’d be rather be out in the woods catching critters, and that’s OK.

But he stuck with it. He persevered. He battled through the worst season, record-wise, he could. And he and the remaining kids fought until the end. I know people like to complain about “participation trophies.” But sometimes, when you’re O-fer, perhaps we should consider “perseverance trophies.” Those last 11 kids could have quit, too. But they proved to themselves that you fight to the finish, even when the journey is kicking your tail. And whether or not they know it, these young men took way more away from this season than any championship could have given them. Cue the music.

Childhood Family

Mother knows best

With Mother’s Day just around the corner, I think it’s high time I take the bold step and say what needs to be said: Moms are kinda important.

There, America. I said what needed to be said, yet none of you had the courage to.

OK, so we all know moms are of course a big deal. My mother is a wonderful human being and a fantastic mother and is happy to be motherly to this day. I don’t mean that as a bad thing. I’m 43, and my mom still worries that I’ve eaten lunch.

I’m also fortunate to be married to a wonderful woman who is also a fantastic mother. (She has made it very clear that lunch is up to me, and if I starve it’s not her fault. Hey, I’m her husband, not her kid.)

My wife and I have always split the duties of parenting, with both of us taking part in all aspects along the way. Well, not ALL aspects. I didn’t have to lug them around inside me for nine months. But don’t blame me for that. I’m not a seahorse, for crying out loud.

But I’ve always been fine with taking part in all of the other parenting parts, be it changing diapers, dinner time, homework, etc. (By the way, when my kids were little I hated when people saw me with my kids and said, “So dad’s babysitting today?” No, Dad is dadding today. Babysitters get paid and leave when the shift is over.)

But try as I might, there are some things that I will never be able to do as well as a mom. And not just the whole having them part. For example:

Moms are better at dressing kids. If you look at pictures of my kids when they were little, it was easy to tell who dressed them. Snappy little fashionable number that matches? Mom. Overalls? Dad.
Moms sense danger much better. Part of that reason, of course, is that dads find danger much better, and one of the many reasons moms are a necessity is to stop dads from turning the stairs into a giant slide for cardboard sleds.
Moms are better at public mishaps. Experience a massive diaper explosion in the middle of the grocery store? Moms sprout nine extra arms and manage to have everything packaged and removed to a restroom in the matter of seconds, whereas dads are more inclined to just wrap everything up in a big bundle, haul it to the car and head home to sort everything out.
Moms are more sympathetic. And by “more sympathetic” I mean less likely to laugh at something, even if it is really funny, such as a child getting stuck in a plastic basketball hoop or tangled up in a bra that was found in the laundry basket.
Moms are better at talking about some things with children, especially if those children are teenage daughters. My daughter and I once had this conversation:

                       ME: You know, if you ever need to talk about … anything …
                       HER: Um, yeah…
                       ME: I mean, after you talk to your mom. Or one of your aunts. Or grandmothers.
                       HER: Yeah.
                       ME: Good talk.

Moms are waaaay more in tune with their kids’ emotions. If a child has had a bad day at school, moms have this freaky sixth sense that targets in on the negative vibe and hyperfocuses in on a solution. Dads are more likely, should they notice, to say to mom, “What’s up with him?”
Moms are masters of subtle verbal communication. If I called my children by their full name, they would respond the same as any other time. Moms? Again, I’m 43, and if my mom says, “Michael Whitfield…” I am immediately a nine-year-old who knows he has done something wrong.

So, yeah, Moms are awesome. We all know it. To my mom, you’re the best a kid could have asked for. To my wife, you’re the best a dad could have asked for. To my my two mothers-in-law, thanks for being two great bonus moms. I’m a lucky guy, all around, as are my kids. So this Mother’s Day, make the awesome moms in your life feel extra special. They’ve earned it. Show them you just how much you love them. Maybe even let them go first on the stair slide.

Adventures Childhood Family

Daddy Daughter Day

My kids are 13 and 15. Oftentimes on weekends, I set off on adventures with my 13-year-old son, tromping around whatever woods or swamps or marshes we can find to catch critters.

I do this because he is my favorite and thus deserves all of my attention.

Ha! Some more bad parenting humor for you. The reason he and I have set off on missions together more than my daughter and me is that my daughter is 15 and has a license and a car. By Friday afternoon, she has already booked her weekend with her friends, which invariably involves movies, shopping, Starbucks, shopping, Starbucks, Starbucks and then some Starbucks.

But recently, my wife and son were out of town, so it was just Allie and me for a couple of days. I told her that I could not wait to go to Starbucks with her and her friends and talk about One Direction or whatever it is teenage girls talk about. Or, I offered up, we could just go hang out, the two of us, and have a daddy-daughter weekend. For some reason, she opted for the latter.

We had a great time, and it was a good chance for just the two of us to hang out. I told her I was in charge of transportation and payment, and she could dictate the itinerary. Some highlights from the weekend:

On Saturday, she wanted to go shopping on King Street in Downtown Charleston. Fair enough, I said. When we got downtown, she realized that she had forgotten her sunglasses. I told we could buy some. We stopped in a store and she looked at a pair. She whispered to me, “Dad, these are $200. Let’s get out of here.” That’s my girl.
We got to see the best of people in a downtown jewelry store. As we were browsing, a customer was snacking on some gummy worms. The employee at the store told her to get out, as no food was allowed. Some words were exchanged, it was suggested the police would be called, and then some more words got exchanged, some of them of the four-letter variety. There were about a half-dozen other customers in there, and we all traded nervous “what in the world?” glances. My daughter whispered to me, “Time to go.” Wise child.
We went to a rooftop restaurant to enjoy the view and a cold beverage. My daughter said, “Can they make fruity drinks but without alcohol?” Sure, I said. The waitress came to take our order and my daughter said, “I’d like … um …” She looked at me. I suppose it’s good that my teen daughter doesn’t know any drink names. “Something fruity. Surprise her. Just, you know, no booze in it.”
That evening, we opted for a minor league hockey game. I learned early on that my daughter has a bloodlust. After about a 10-second fight, she was wide eyed. “ARE THEY GONNA FIGHT AGAIN!?!?!?!?”
We were sitting high up in the stands, and after the first period, I said to my daughter, “You want to keep sitting here, or do you want to go on an adventure?” “Adventure. Duh.” We left our seats and moseyed down toward the ice. The key in improving a situation like this is never to lie or cheat. But just see how far people will let you go. We approached a section near the goal. Down below were dozens of empty seats. We stopped at the usher. Had he asked for tickets, we would have been on our way. I said, “Mind if we head down there?” “No problem,” he said. Seats on the glass.
I did provide one incredibly embarrassing moment for my daughter when she was getting some Dippin’ Dots. As she was in line, I noticed there was a restroom right behind me. I told her I was going to use the bathroom while she ordered. I probably should have paid more attention to the fact that there were zero urinals, but I had to go. I slipped into a stall and used the restroom. As I stepped out, I saw a high heel stepping into another stall, closing the door behind. Oh, no. I scurried out and saw my daughter standing there with a look of horror on her face. “That’s the women’s room, isn’t it?” “YES!!! DAAAA-AAAD!” The Dippin’ Dots lady found it hilarious. I’m just glad I could inadvertently step into the political controversy du jour at a minor league hockey game. Yay, me.

It was a great time for the just the two of us, and I’m glad my teenage daughter actually likes spending some QT with me. Maybe next weekend, I’ll surprise and join her and her friends at Starbucks. We can talk about One Direction. Or something. She’ll love that!