Easy Come, Easy Go

A few weeks back my buddy Tim and I entered a March Madness basketball pool. This in itself isn't all that newsworthy because we enter a basketball pool every year. When I was younger and more willing to fill my head and time with meaningless scores and stats I felt the $5 or $20 entry fee was but a small investment toward greater reward. Of course, this was never the case.

Now that I'm older, busier, and likely won't watch a single college basketball game all year it would serve to reason my chances of winning are even slimmer than before. When I look at all those schools in the brackets I tend to remember them for how good they were eight or nine years ago and pick accordingly. Or else I just keep picking the teams who are seeded highest so I can hope to finish in a 50-way tie with all the other mindless knuckleheads filling out a bracket.

This year I chose a handful of upsets here and there but kept most of the #1 seeds in line to play for the championship. I wasn't sure who the best of the best was supposed to be but took a random guess - the Kentucky Wildcats. It turns out they were something like 33-2 this year and the hands-down favorite to win it all.  A lucky guess except that about 60% of America chose them to win which made my chances of winning the pool even worse. On my second bracket I tabbed Ohio State who, it turns out, had been playing really badly over the past few weeks and very few people were picking. Again, the chances were slim.

But, alas, the stars have aligned. For all the ignorance I brought to the two brackets I filled out I am currently in 8th and 16th place. Out of 432. Kentucky is already in the final and Ohio State is playing Kansas in the other semi-final. If Kansas wins tonight and then falls to the Wildcats on Monday I'll finish 3rd. If Ohio State wins tonight and then goes on to beat the Wildcats on Monday I'll come in 5th. Gambling is illegal so let's just say 3rd place is good enough to win 1,000 pats on the back from the 429 people who finished behind me while 5th place is worth 600 congratulatory high-fives. Of course, if neither of those scenarios play out I'll have accomplished nothing more than being strung along for an extra week or two.

Of course, I'd gladly trade this for one of those three winning lottery tickets that will share more than $600 million dollars. We never buy lottery tickets so our chances of splitting that jackpot weren't all that spectacular except that Tim buys tickets each week and has long promised to give us 10% should he ever win. During that time he and I have come up with some great ideas as to what we'd do with that much money. Some, like building a "major league" whiffle ball park for ourselves to play in, were realistic while others, like buying out Gary Sheffield's Yankee contract and making him go back and play for the small-market Milwaukee Brewers,  were a little more far-fetched.

For this week's lotto jackpot of more than a half-billion dollars Tim bought not one, but five tickets. The extra four bucks increased his chances of winning from about 170,000,000 to 1 to a far more likely 34,000,000 to 1. Turns out it didn't help much. He was a loser for the 518th time in a row. So I guess the whiffle ball park will have to wait at least another week. Until then...

Go KENTUCKY!

Choices

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
                                                                --Henry David Thoreau

Life presents us an endless string of choices. While some are really big, most are so mundane we don't even recognize them as a choice at all - say, whether you brush or floss first.

Of course, there are an infinite number of choices we fail to recognize not because they are mundane but because we've been programmed - make that, conditioned - to ignore them. Just this morning I could have woken up and started singing "Oh What a Wonderful Morning" at the top of my lungs while mercilessly tickling Tricia awake. However, I subconsciously know there's a very good chance I'd receive a swift knee to the groin so my mind skips over this choice without my conscious self even realizing it. More realistically I could have ridden my bike to the grocery store this morning, packed the groceries into the bike trailer, and pedaled back home all in the name of fresh air, exercise, and conservation. But this falls outside of my normal routine so I never considered doing so.

Life's big choices weigh on us more heavily. Where to go to school. What to study. Who to marry. Where to live. What church to go to. How to spend, or maybe even save, our money. How we make each of these choices says a lot about us. In many ways these choices define us - if not for ourselves, at least for others.

I chose to go to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville because it was what we could afford. I chose to study education because journalism was not what I thought it would be and I remembered how much I enjoyed kids. I chose to marry Tricia because she was kind, smart, fun, and pretty (At the time I started with pretty and let the other reasons reveal themselves along the way). I chose not to go to church because I realized that any god who would let my dad suffer so much in one lifetime deserved neither my love nor my  faith. We choose to spend our money, when possible, on experiences rather than things.

Some choices are easier to make than others. There's a quote I like that goes "If you limit your choices to only what seems possible or reasonable you disconnect yourself from what you truly want and all that is left is compromise." Compromise is easy. And safe.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I watched the kids jump from our new dock into the lake. The water was so cold it would have been easier to dangle their feet in and splash around a bit. That's what the grown-ups did. But while we chose to wait until summer when the water is less likely to emit an initial scream of discomfort, the kids chose to jump right in because it was exactly what they wanted to be doing at that very moment of time. No amount of cool breezes or chill bumps were about to keep them from their fun.

Seeing them splashing and laughing out in the water made me think, too, about how happy we've all been since we moved here into the country. Swinging from tire swings, building fires, and looking out into nights so black you wonder if there's anything out there at all. Moving here, that was a choice too. A choice that at the time was not easy. It was definitely not safe. But it was right.

I ran back to the house to grab my camera so I could capture some of the things that remind me how much I love living and playing in the woods. In the meantime we'll think on other big choices that seem, at least right now, to be impossible.

What I Hate: V - X

It's been quite a long while since I have visited this list. Some -namely my buddy and co-blogger Tim - would suggest this layoff is due to the fact I have finally reached the bane of all ABC books and lists - the letter X. This is a finicky letter that most dictionaries can knock out in less than three pages. A letter any novice Scrabble player hates to pull from the bag when all the A's and O's on the board are tied-up.

 It's been my experience, outside of the oft-used xylophone and x-ray, that most writers cheat on this letter. Our son Ty has an ABC book of Alaska and for the letter X it reads "X-tra Large State!" This author obviously has no integrity. There is no such word as X-tra. I would think that if you choose to take on such a task you should, at the very least, be diligent and do your research; or else select a more writer-friendly format.

Our school had a visiting author this past week. He writes ABC books for children (although he claims to really write for teachers). Over the past two decades he has written more than a dozen of these alphabet books. There's the Jet ABC Book, the Plane ABC Book, the Extinct ABC Book, the Vegetable ABC Book, and so on. During his visit the teachers had an opportunity to have lunch with him and ask all sorts of questions and learn more about what it's like to be a writer. He explained, with regard to writing ABC books, the first twenty letters are a piece of cake but the final six are excruciating. U, V, W, X, Y, and Z. No, these letters are not for the meek. Especially that damn X.

Here's the latest installment...

V- VENTURE CAPITAL. This one may not be fair given that I have no earthly idea what venture capitalism actually is. I looked it up only to find that the definition made no sense to me what-so-ever. If you have sixty seconds you don't mind wasting you too can give it a try:

Venture capital (VC) is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which and usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as biotechnology, IT, software, etc. The typical venture capital investment occurs after the seed funding round as growth funding round (also referred to as Series A round) in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event, such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital is a subset of private equity. Therefore, all venture capital is private equity, but not all private equity is venture capital.

Others: vagueness, veils, valedictorian speeches, Vaseline, vampire books, vandalism, vans, varmint (the word), velvet, vengefulness, ventriloquists, and vermouth (it just sounds snotty)

W - WRESTLING (at least the "professional" sort). I enjoy stopping on wrestling programs just to see how long it takes Tricia to get mad at me. When I was a kid I really liked wrestling - especially Hulk Hogan. As he headed to ring they would play his theme song "I Am a Real American." Do you want to know what's more embarrassing than the fact that I know this? The fact that Newt Gingrich used this very song last week at one of his events. Yikes!

Others: waiting rooms, wallpaper, warts, whiskey, and wedding receptions

X - XANADU. A really, really, really, really bad movie. The equally lame tagline was The story of a girl who makes dreams come true. This movie was so bad the only bright spot movie critic Roger Ebert could find to highlight was that "It's not as bad as 'Can't Stop the Music'."

Others:  xenophobia, Xena Warrior Princess, and X-tra large food portions