Dwight's Perfect Date

COLUMN: To Call or Not to Call

By Tobin Barnes
Been coping with the ups and downs of the flu lately. Boy, has that been fun.

He’s been hanging around for the last week or so. Even plopped down and butted into my President’s Day three-day weekend. Just what I was looking for. Old Ugly, come to visit. Old Mr. No Fun.

And, you know, the whole thing’s more mental than physical.

Started out, took a sick day and laid in bed just like you’re supposed to. Got in about 15 hours of sleep that day. Thought that’d give the flu the old heave-ho.

Didn’t. He lingered on. He likes to linger. “Linger” is his word. He invented it.

Guess he wanted me to take two or three days off instead, maybe a week. Who knows? No one. You never know with these things. That’s the problem. It takes decision-making on a Presidential level to decide whether to call in sick again or not. Second time is tougher.

To get over it, you’ve got to rest. Sure. But what’s worse? Being sick at work or being sick about the work piling up on your desk?

Besides, how sick is sick?

I’ve been sicker, but this is bad.

How bad is bad?

Purdy bad.

How blue is the sky, how green is the grass.

Purdy blue and purdy green.

Can I go in and work?

I suppose I can.

Should you?

Maybe.

Who wouldn’t?

He wouldn’t, but I might. Except this time. I think I’m too sick.

Nah, you’re not that sick.

Yes I am.

No you’re not. There’s people in the hospital really sick. Suffering sick. You’re not that sick.

Yeah, but….

But what?

Uh huh, the sickest thing might be all this reasoning. Anyway, completely muddle-headed, you decide to go into work.

Hey, it’ll be better than making up all that stuff later. And maybe I’ll feel better anyway. Sometimes I do.

But not this time.

You wish you’d called in sick like you should’ve. But it’s too late, now. You’re stuck, now. You’re screwed, now.

You won’t make this mistake tomorrow.

But the next day you feel better. Maybe. Wait. Not really sure.

Whole thing starts over again.

See, if you’d stayed home two or three days straight, it would have cleared up completely. Now it’s going to drag on. Weeks maybe of not feeling quite right. You poor wishy-washy sap, you.

Do the convalescence thing the right way, right away. Don’t go to work, don’t infect others. You have responsibilities to mankind. Get plenty of rest, drink lots of liquids, until you’re well enough to go back to work.

When’s that?

Hopefully, you’ll know, for everybody’s sake.

I think thinking about it is the worst part. Maybe.

Something Eerie About This: A New Monkish Cult

I Love Jesus But I Drink A Little

(Sent by Tom Cooley)

Three Reasons Not to Get Drunk

(Sent by Roy Wilson)

COLUMN: Don't Bury My Mii on the Lone Prairie

By Tobin Barnes
Recently, we got the Wii console.

I know. Not exactly in the vanguard, are we? It’s been around for a while, and it’s taken off like wildfire.

Saw it advertised, but never physically ran into it until we were at Chuck’s house Christmas Day. Chuck had spouses throwing punches at each other with the Wii boxing game. Husbands and wives worked up a sweat going for knock-out punches.

It immediately appealed to us. Not necessarily throwing digital haymakers at each other, but the getting-up-and-doing-something aspect of the Wii system.

Prior to that, I’d never been much of a video game player. Seemed like a lot of sitting around twiddling your fingers, getting lost in a fog of fantasy, and becoming totally unaware of real life (which, of course, may be the point).

Seemed like video game players were meat for the zombie zone. Better things to do with my time, I harrumphed.

But Wii is different. You don’t just sit there when you do Wii stuff. You get up and move around. You become active. The heart gets pumping and the lungs work harder.
In other words, you’re kind of exercising. And who couldn’t use some of that.

Wii won’t get you ready for the Olympics, but it will get you in gear a heck of a lot more than you probably are now. And that’s a good thing.

I guess Wii kinda stands for “Weee!” as in fun, as well as “We” as in one to four people can participate at a time. Our Wii console came with Wii Sports: tennis, baseball, golf, boxing, and bowling. I’ve really gotten into the boxing and tennis games, which are surprisingly involving.

You don’t actually get punched in the boxing game, thank goodness, but you do feel your fists swishing through the air. And in the tennis game, it feels like you’re really hitting the ball backhand and forehand, going for winners down the line. Plus, you don’t have to run around picking up the balls. So far, I haven’t spent much time with the baseball, golf, and bowling games, but I intend to.

Before you get going with these games, it’s fun to create your own “Mii character” to represent you in the boxing ring and tennis court, etc. Putting together your Mii self is easy and intuitive. I gave mine grey hair, glasses, and a mustache, just like “Mii,” and he wears a black cap.

We also got the Wii Fit software and its accessory, which is a plastic balance/sensor board. Wii Fit is a tool to help you get in better shape by having you do aerobic, balance, strength, and yoga activities. Many of the activities are game oriented, which help keep you involved and coming back for more.

Wii Fits starts out by having you get up on the board for measurements like weight and BMI (body mass index). I immediately found out that the designers had neglected to program flattery into the Wii Fit. After taking my measurements, it hurriedly transformed my sleek little Mii character into a dumpy, chubby little porker.

Now normally, I can fool myself in front of a mirror by sucking it in a little. Not so with my Mii reflection running around on the Wii-projected TV screen. The hallucination of fitness has been rudely and summarily erased—especially when the board makes a little “Ohhh!” sound every time I get on it, like “Take it easy on me, Mr. Beefy.”

Next, it put me through some balance tests, then crunched all the accumulated figures and announced with a false fanfare that I had the body of a 64-year-old.

All this would be pretty gosh-darned demoralizing if it weren’t for the fun and interest involved in trying to improve these numbers on subsequent “body tests” that Wii encourages you to take thereafter.

Fortunately, there have been improvements since that first time, particularly as to my Wii age, which has gone down considerably.

And that’s a good thing. For a while there, I thought they’d put my chubby little Mii character into a casket and lower it into the digital ground of a Wii cemetery.

COLUMN: A Chance Understanding

By Tobin Barnes
Every once in a while, when the moon is in its proper phase, the stars have aligned, and “the world is spinning in greased grooves,” a teacher’s students fully understand the content of the day’s class.

Like I tell the kids, it makes a teacher’s heart go pitter-pat. (They roll their eyes.)

It happened to me just the other day in my Advanced Placement Language class, and those kids are pretty sharp. I’m always learning something. Sometimes, they do too.

We were covering this short, non-fiction piece called “Four Kinds of Chance” by James H. Austin in our Riverside Reader. At first you’d think chance is chance, but according to Austin, it’s not that simple.

For example, he says Chance I is just pure dumb luck. We’ve all been there. Something good happens to us, and we didn’t do anything to deserve it. You step out into the parking lot and there’s a $20 bill.

On the other hand, Chance II happens the more you try. As Austin says, “Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you least expect it.” In other words, spend a lot of time in the parking lot.

This isn’t passive dumb luck like just going about your business. You’ve got to be active, you’ve got to “stir the pot.” The more you try to find good things, the more likely you’ll find them.

But neither Chance I nor II takes any special ability.

Austin says that in Chance III, “We see blind luck, but in camouflage. Chance presents the clue, the opportunity exists, but it would be missed except by that one person uniquely equipped to observe it, visualize it conceptually, and fully grasp its significance.”

Austin points to Louis Pasteur’s famous quote: “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” Austin’s prime example is when Alexander Fleming noticed that a mold had fallen into his culture dish, and the staphylococcal colonies near it failed to grow.

Most of us would have thought, “Huh?” or even more likely, “Doh!” Fleming instead thought, “Hey, penicillin!” or at least, eventually he did.

So here’s the lineup according to Austin: Chance I (accident), Chance II (general exploratory behavior), and Chance III (sagacity).

Some can take advantage of Chance III, some can’t.

A girl in my class, Katie, raised her hand at this point and said she had an example of Chance III. Just the kind of initiative a teacher is looking for.

She said she liked to shop at T.J. Maxx. (Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.) Yeah, she continued, you can get really good deals there. But you’ve got to be wise enough to appreciate them. (Okay, this was making sense now.) Like there was this Michael Kors handbag there, she said, and it was $200 dollars off the original price.

Yeah, bingo!

There’s Chance III: A lot of people would have missed that great bargain, myself included (Who’s Michael Kors?), but not her—she has the “prepared mind” Louis Pasteur was talking about.

And Chance IV?

Austin calls it Altamirage because it’s like what happened at the Spanish cave of Altamira. A dog had originally found this cave randomly hunting for game. Some years later, an amateur archaeologist, Don Marcelino de Sautuola, was exploring it. His daughter, Maria, had asked to go along.

Unlike Don Marcelino, who studied the floor of the cave where archaeological artifacts are usually found, his daughter open-mindedly looked up and all around. On the ceiling she found “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory.”

So through the dog and his hobby and his daughter, Don Marcelino had stumbled upon some of man’s first pictorial expressions. And to further emphasize the complexity of Chance IV, Austin says, “In quest of science, he happened upon Art.”

I’m not sure we ever get to Altamirage in class, but once in a while we get three quarters of the way there.

Truck Duck