My son turned 11 last August and starting in December of 2011, birthday parties for his classmates have morphed from bowling and cake into disco parties.  A disco party for a group of 11 year-olds seems to involve small rooms, loud music, and 20 to 30 kids for 2 or 3 hours.  The kids seem to have fun, so that’s all good.

But you are expected to deal with members of the opposite sex at a dance, and this is all unknown territory for my son.  So when I was walking with him to the latest party, he asked for my advice on how to get along with girls.

Now, here’s where I have to admit that I did ramble on for about 5 minutes about self-confidence and respect and emotions.  But I stopped myself, because the voice in my head reminded me that the words coming out of my mouth were actually going to be heard and remembered by my son.

Every now and then, as a parent, you get that jolt in your chest that reminds you of a very important fact: THIS IS IMPORTANT.

So, I stopped blabbing, and went for real honesty.

“Derek, I don’t really know that much about relationships.  I spent a lot of time confused and doing stupid things and hurting people that didn’t deserve to be hurt.  So I can’t give you all of the answers to this.  But I can tell you a few things that I did learn that are true. And I hope that you will remember these true things and they will help you go further in your own life.”

Derek said, “Okay” and looked at me a little dubiously, because his Papa knows everything, how could he not know all about females?

I gathered my thoughts and told him the very little bit that I knew about relationships.

“Don’t lie.  If you like some girl, tell them that.  And if you don’t like them, be honest about that too.  Lies always come out.  I told lies because I didn’t want to hurt people, or didn’t want to make myself look bad, or because a lie was easier than the truth.  But it’s not.  I always hurt the girl more, made myself look worse, and made my life harder with lying.”  Then I repeated that in Dutch to make sure it all fit in his head, “Je moet eerlijk zijn”.

“You are awesome.  You are more handsome and funnier than you think you are.  You have to know that so that you can be confident and act like yourself, which is good because you are amazing.  Girls like it when you are acting like who you are instead of acting like who you think they might like.”  He looked a little confused at that one, so I rephrased it, “Girls have this kind of radar in their head that tells them when a boy is being real and not fake.  I think they can smell it.”

“Which girl in your class is the one that all the boys want to date?”  Derek told me a name without hesitation.  ”There are 14 girls in your class (I just guessed that, but he didn’t correct me) but all the boys want to go out with one girl, right?” At his nod, I shared some game theory with him, “If all of the boys are competing for just one girl, that leaves 13 other girls that no one is fighting over.  If you ask to go out with them, they will probably say, ‘Yes’ and will probably be nicer too.”  He seemed a little dubious about that one, but I think I will have to revisit that in a couple of years after his voice drops.

I thought that three big truths was enough for a 20 minute walk through the snow, so I stopped right there.  And to be honest with you, dear reader, I don’t know that I KNOW any more truth than what I told Derek.  I have a lot of theories, but I’m pretty sure that half of them are baloney.

We arrived and Derek gave me a big hug and told me he loved me and thanked me for my advice before he went inside.  And that let me know one other thing that I was absolutely sure of, I may have not been good at relationships with women, but I am a fantastic father :)

Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz “Get Low” as a bluegrass song:

I’m not usually a big fan of bluegrass, but this was a hoot.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I’m surprised by the person looking back at me.  My reflection is more somber or calm, handsome or icky that I imagined myself to be.  If eyes are the window to the soul, I think my shutters are stuck.  And that leads me into some words about words:

Words are not thoughts.  They try to be thoughts, they advertise themselves as conveyors of thought and emotion, they clad themselves in the illusion of meaning, but words are what they are.  And words are not thoughts.  I speak words, try to squeeze this immense ball of emotion and confusion in my chest into chains of syllables.  But the words are not my thoughts.  I can see it, SEE IT, when words go awry, when the meaning of words gets jumbled and twisted, my imperfect translation imperfectly translated.  Like trying to express yourself, the depth of your innermost being, through Google Translate after moving from English to Spanish to French and back to English.  Only bits come through and much confusing and misleading cruft.  I am writing words, you are reading these words.  But these words are in no way a reflection of the pressure my emotions exert within me.  I feel my heart as a supernova, an exploding star trapped within skin and ribs and muscle and my crossed arms.  And all that I can do to let out this incredible pressure, the only thing to allow this explosion of heat out of my chest is words, which you will not hear or read or interpret correctly, because words are not thoughts.

When I moved to the Netherlands over 10 years ago, I had taken several tests to find out how big my vocabulary was. Out of several questionnaires, I averaged a vocabulary of 60,000 words. In case you were wondering, knowing the usage and meaning of 16% of English words is pretty impressive. I could read things like Hobbes’s “Leviathan” without breaking a sweat or reaching for a dictionary.

But I have now lived in a strange land for 10 years and Dutch takes up quite a bit of my head space. So, what affect, if any, has this had on my mother tongue? The fine folks at Dictionary.com have created a vocabulary test/builder called Word Dynamo.  And one of the first steps in this system is to find the extent of your current vocabulary.  According to this service, my stockpile of English esoteric words has shrunk to a mere 42,689 words.  This isn’t really a problem, per se.  I mean, how often am I going to be called on to know the definition and usage of words more complex and antiquated than “sesquipedalian”, a word so long and obscure that the spell-check in my web browser insists that I am spelling it incorrectly (I’m not)?

No, I think in a world that relies on English as the default language of international commerce and the internet, the full extent of the richness of the English vocabulary will be pruned away.  Not quite to the level of Newspeak, but a definite sloughing off of obscurantist verbiage.

A manager I had in America was always very keen on good documentation, “You never know when you’ll be hit by a bread truck.”  That means, of course, that if I was to meet an unhappy end (or leave the company) they wanted to have a documentation trail so that whoever followed me would know what the heck was going on.

This morning, the bread truck came up in a conversation about maintaining our work Wiki and I mentioned the dreaded bread truck and the need for documentation.  There were a couple of blank stares, the kind I get when I have gone off on some verbal safari that non-Richard’s give me in the hopes that I will eventually come back into coherence land or just shut up.  Then I realized the problem, there are no bread trucks in the Netherlands.

“Oh!  You don’t have bread trucks here.

Your bread stays safely in the bakeries and isn’t allowed out on the road where roving gangs of bagels and buns run down unwary pedestrians.

America is much different.        In the States, there is seemingly no end to the bread violence.”

{{I was getting a little emotional here}}

” I remember, as a kid, seeing the Bread Battle of Boston on our new color television.

The raspberry jelly running into the gutters.  {{sob}}

The horror

the horror”

I’m telling you, it was an Oscar-worthy performance and a neat bit of conceptual verbal art, and all I’m getting is blank stares and patient silence.  ’When is he going to stop?’

I miss friends who knew me when.

Fireworks are legal for individuals to set off in the Netherlands from 11:30 New Year’s Eve to 2:00 on New Year’s Day.  Actually, I didn’t look that up, so the exact time range might be different.  I tell my family and friends what it is like, but they just don’t believe me.  So, I filmed 1 minute and 30 seconds of over an HOUR of non-stop fireworks that were bursting right outside my window at the beginning of 2012:

Happy New Year!

First off, it’s not universal.  My wife does not nag me about this.

Second, Yahoo! Answers gives lots of answers that are not the true answer, I tried to add the correct answer but was not able to do so this morning.

Most men just don’t understand why this is a big deal.  When I found out *why* it was a big deal, I was pretty shocked by it.  I realized that all of those comedians making jokes about this probably didn’t understand a very basic truth about the difference between men and women.  It made me happy to have this understanding, and I thought I should share it with the world.

Here it is, the great difference between men and women:

Some women (maybe even most of them) don’t turn on the lights when they go to the toilet in the middle of the night.

Now, if you are a woman, and you thought to yourself, “Of course I don’t turn on the lights, I want to go right back to bed.”, then you are also a woman who insists on leaving the seat down.

In the beginning, and for the first 5 years I live in the Netherlands, I thought and spoke English all the time.  My work programming, which means that, for the most part, I speak to and interact with computers, who demand perfect Perl language skills and don’t care at all about my facility with Dutch.

But for the last few years that has changed more and more and Dutch has become a regular part of my interaction with customers and clients.  I speak Dutch on the phone and, in a meeting with a Dutch person, prefer that they speak in Dutch.  It makes them more comfortable, and it is much easier to listen to a foreign language than to speak it.

I can speak it, and it feels weird.  I’m interested in knowing if other people with 2 or more languages in their head feel the same thing.  I feel like there is a place in my mind that is doing the thinking and generating concepts that need to be communicated to another person.  That point of generation then pushes those ideas out and, depending on my audience, they are then converted into Dutch or English.  If you have ever decorated a cake, you know exactly the concept I am trying to move into YOUR head.  It’s just like a frosting decoration bag, a container of ideas that must be formed in a particular way.  With Dutch, the nozzle is small (limited vocabulary) and the shape quite tricky to manage.  With English, it is effortless.

So, my bi-lingual reader, how does it feel to you?  Getting those ideas out of your head in the language that is not your mother tongue, does it feel like you are pushing them around inside your head?