my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘friends’ Category

I was lucky to have friends in town for a mutual friend’s wedding this weekend. It’s amazing how many people I know from “the old days” that I’m not in touch with anymore, even though they are good and decent people… we just don’t make the effort to drive to faraway cities (or to the West Coast, for that matter).

The men I talked to were mainly all dads, and I think the consensus was that we take trips mainly with or to family, so other trips to see friends are squeezed out of the schedule. I mentioned to another friend the other day that I’m trying to get all my friends and family in one place, something I called “Total Thomas Convergence” (or TTC for short). I have a few great friends in Buffalo, but in fact everyone I know is extremely busy, as is my little family, so we rarely have social time with grownups who are not immediate members of our family. (Fortunately, the grownups who are immediate members of our family are also good and decent people!)

We did end up having a little bit of a pool party, too, because we had a few people who were in town for the wedding come over. The thermometer in the pool said 80, but none of us who went in the water felt that was an honest reckoning. In fact, one swimmer was sure it was 80 Kelvin, not 80 Fahrenheit.

And I did manage to finish the steps up to the deck before the guests arrived. After they left, I finished the railing and the gate on the deck, so it is now as safe as could be. I have a little more to do on the deck, however, including a handrail for the steps. I’m also going to do a little wiring, so that there is an outdoor, grounded power outlet for the pool filter, and I’ll install a motion-sensor light on the peak of the garage to shine down on the pool. (The web-cams are already installed, but they are not infrared cameras, so the lights will come in handy at night.)

(oops, my finger got in front of the camera lens)

Lexington Co-Op has all kinds of good chocolate, including the organically grown Equal Exchange brand. I picked up two bars, one labelled “VERY DARK” and one dark with almonds. It is really good chocolate. The very dark chocolate is 71% cacao content. Mmmmmmmmm

I had a great lunch at Lexington Co-Op, too. I put a few scoops of assorted vegetarian, vegan, and meat-based dishes from their hot bar into a cardboard take-out container, grabbed a bottle of unsweetened green tea (its cap is in the photo too) from Honest Tea ( . . . ” such a lonely word . . . ” ), and then grabbed a piece of cake from the cooler, too. I know it sounds like a lot of food. But I like to eat.

But it was also a great lunch because I was with friends. I hadn’t seen R.T. in a while, and he was in town for a short visit, so it was a little reunion with P.D., R.B., and me.

Something about eating vegan, organic, and socially conscious foods at an open-air patio table on Elmwood made me feel conspicuously urban, though.

At work (both my day job and my bike taxi business), the opportunity to make a first impression comes often. At my day job (computer guy at a college), I meet a lot of new students as I hand out their username forms and tell them about the computer-based services we offer. On the bike taxi, I ride past hundreds of people every day.

From the very beginning of my work on the bike taxi, I recognized that when I smile, people are more likely to want to be passengers, so whenever someone was facing the bike taxi, and I was facing them, I would try to smile and make eye contact. (Oddly enough, this habit started to cross over into my regular bicycle riding, when pedestrians have no idea why I would be looking at them and smiling.)

One evening while I was pedaling the bike taxi up one of Buffalo’s slight inclines that passes for a hill, a person who knows me from my day job saw me. The next day, when she said that she had seen me, I asked her why she didn’t say hello. Her answer changed the way I ride the bike taxi. She said something like I looked like I was working hard, that my facial expression gave her the impression she should let me keep riding instead of stopping me to chat. Now I assure you, I’m not bragging about my hill-riding ability, but Buffalo is pretty flat, and with an empty bike taxi, I can’t imagine I would have had anything like a strained look of effort on my face. But that’s apparently what my neutral face looks like.

From that point on, I’ve been trying to smile all the time, not just when I see that someone is looking directly at the bike taxi–because obviously there are times when I don’t see who is looking.

I hope my smile doesn’t look like one of those fake smiles. You know the kind, when you’re sitting for a family portrait, and 13 of your nieces and nephews have to sit still for waaaay too long, so you have to hold the smile until your face feels like it has gone through a workout. When I’m riding the bike taxi, I really am having fun, so I hope that comes across to potential passengers.

Well, one day recently, it dawned on me. Duh, how could I not have thought of it sooner? When I get home from work, I usually have a plain face, not a frown or a smile, just neutral. But my neutral face doesn’t convey neutrality, as my co-worker observed that time she saw me riding the bike taxi. And that same neutral face is what I usually have at my day job, too, so I’ve also made an effort to greet new people with a more friendly face. So why not make an effort to enter my own house with a smile, so that my family knows I’m glad to see them?

The effort so far is paying off. Right away, any trace of a neutral mood is gone, as I laugh at myself for the simple effort of smiling. And when I walk through the door, no one has to ask how my day was, because they can see from my smile that I’m just glad to see them. It sets a positive tone, and it helps me take a more patient approach with the kids. I may have ruined Fathers Day, but I’m not going to let that get in the way of many other good days.

It almost seems disingenuous, putting a smile on your face when you may or may not have anything in particular to smile about. My attitude as an adult and a professional has been that I will just smile when there is something specific to smile about, and at all other times I’ll be a serious adult, a serious professional. Blah blah blah. If we wear nice clothes to work, or out with friends, or to a family get-together, why not wear a nice face?

My name is on Mars.

Yes, the planet, not the candy bar.

A friend of mine added my name to the disk that was burned and put aboard the Phoenix Mars Lander that touched down last week. He did this a long time ago, but I had forgotten about it until he reminded me the other day.

Click here to see the lander on Mars.