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?

The dream just before waking.

And the music was AMAZING.

A mashup between “End of Line (Photek Remix)” from Daft Punk on the “Tron Legacy – R” album and “Closer” from Nine Inch Nails on the “Pretty Hate Machine” album.

I wish I had a board and a few hours to mix it myself.

Not exactly Kubla Khan, but very beautiful.

“Tron Legacy – R” is one of the main things I listen to while programming.  It’s musically varied enough not to be boring, it doesn’t have a lot of words to pull me out of flow, and the underlying flavors are Daft Punk, which is like musical caffeine to me.

I looked on You Tube for this particular combination, which is soooooo obvious to anybody who has heard both of them, but could only find some hack mashups between songs that really shouldn’t have been put through a speaker at the same time.

Poetry

Music

Art

These three, but the greatest of these is music.

Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements.

This is awesome.

This morning started out like any other Friday. Get up, take a shower, and gather all the clothes that need to be ironed together for my 5 minutes of steam and wrinkle-free time. I usually listen to a radio show on my iPhone while I’m doing this, Marc Maron’s WTF, the Majority Report, or the latest Nerdist podcast.

But this morning, my phone didn’t want to acknowledge that I existed. Home button presses, finger swipes, vigorous shakes, colorful and colloquial curses (“You son of a mother-less goat!”) were all to no avail. It was like the iPhone, the fully charged iPhone, just didn’t want to be bothered about my need to be entertained or even about my current frame of reality.

And I will admit this was where my mind went a little bit sideways –

And that made me dive into a little play in my head where my family is waiting for me to get out of bed and they are scared out of their minds because Dad’s iPhone is flying through the air and cursing at them, held by my invisible spirit form.

Then it started working again.

That’s a terrible denouement, I acknowledge that and I respect your opinion.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often I watch it, the movie “Stranger Than Fiction” still touches me. I was thinking about that earlier today, how growing up has opened me up.

In the time before,
before moving to a different country
before having a child
before being married
before having life happen

I would not have been able to feel the emotional truth of events in my life.

I hosted poetry slams, competed in them, heard great writers performing insightful and touching works. But didn’t truly feel those words and works.

Commercials had no emotional effect on me, aside from getting a chuckle.

Puppy dogs and kittens and very depressing advertisements for disaster victims didn’t really break through.

But they do now.

I have a tough time making it all the way through an episode of This American Life without getting choked up now.

And so, I ask a bigger question.  Is this emotional maturity or a reaction to pain?  Is empathy only possible to those who have known emotional hurt?  Do I now need to look at people who are empathetic and think, “What happened to make you this way?  It must have been bloody awful.”

But, I am a the administrator of a personality test system and that gives me access to a lot of research material!

<20 minutes later>

I pull up the results of the Tjoa Emotional Index (a test that asks people how they are feeling) with a personality test based on the Big5 model (OP5) and see that there is, in fact, no correlation between empathy and sadness.

So there goes that theory.

Anyway, I wanted to share an essential moment of truth, got side tracked by a piece of statistical research, and now I don’t know how to end this post.