Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I’ve noticed something that I can’t explain.

I’m a creature of routine to a certain extent. As a result of this, I generally eat just about the same thing every day. In part this is because I’m always running late in the morning and need something quickly, in part because by “standardizing” what I have every day I can have it prepared for the whole week and just grab and go as I’m heading out the door.

There’s a reason that Steve Jobs had whole closets full of the exact same black turtlenecks and jeans. He never had to spend a second thinking or making decisions about something as trivial as what to wear.

One of the things that I have almost every day is a hard-boiled egg. It’s quick, it’s relatively healthy, it’s got some protein, and in theory at least, it’s easy.

For years we’ve been on a quest to find out how to perfectly hard-boil eggs. (I could have sworn that I’ve ranted about it here, but for the life of me I couldn’t find any thing by searching for either “egg” or “boiled.”) We think we’ve got it about right.

FAQ: Put eggs in a pot with about 3 cups of water, put it on a low boil for 27 minutes. When the timer goes off, immediately pour out the boiling water and gently fill the pot with ice. This will cause the eggs to shrink while the shells stay pretty much unchanged, so the egg pulls away from the shell, making it much easier to peel the shell off. So easy that one tap and the shell just about cracks in half and falls off by itself.

Except on Thursday.

We boil six eggs on Sunday, for my breakfasts on Monday through Saturday. (Sunday morning we go out for breakfast before going grocery shopping.) The six eggs come from the same carton, they’re prepared the same way, they should by rights be about as identical as they can be.

However, I’ve noticed that almost every week, the egg I take on Thursday does NOT allow the shell to be peeled off easily. It fights every molecule of the way, the shell clinging to the white egg by shattering into pieces about five microns across, practically requiring sandpaper to get it off. The only way to eat the Thursday egg is by doing the snake thing, swallowing the entire egg whole, crushing it in our gullet, and regurgitating back up the whole and empty shell.

Why Thursday? The eggs are all the same, they’re all from the same carton, they’re all prepared the same, they’re all kept in the refrigerator the exact same way in the same bowl. What variable is at play that makes the Thursday eggs so different from the Wednesday and Friday eggs?

See, this is what your brain is reduced to thinking about after it fries (like an egg!!) from thinking about the state of our nation’s government (or lack thereof). Thanks, Trump!

We all have things that we would like to be doing differently, ways in which we would like to be “better.”

Assuming we’re talking about something plausible and within shouting distance of reality, we have some vision or ideal image of ourselves that would be better, stronger, faster, smarter, more relaxed, richer…

The paradox is that we generally like who we are – we are who we are because we’re comfortable with it. We are what we are because we are. (“Wow! Farm house, man!”) But it’s true. If we truly don’t like some aspect of ourselves badly enough, we’ll do what is possible to change it.

Within reason. (If you’re 5’6″ and your dream in life is to play center in the NBA…)

But that vision of ourselves in our heads won’t be us. It might be a better version of our “right now” selves, but it won’t be the same. It can’t be.

There’s the rub, there’s where the trepidation hides, there’s where the outright fear comes from. What if we make the changes and then we don’t like being that person? No matter how much we wish or hope, none of those changes come for free. Are we willing to pay the price? Will that also change us into someone different enough so that we don’t like them?

What if those we love don’t love us any more when we become that new and improved version of ourselves? What if we don’t love those we love now after we’ve gone and deliberately changed ourselves?

That’s some scary shit, right there.

Lose ten pounds? Twenty? Great! How many hours are you going to spend at the gym, or running, or on a bike, or whatever? How much are you willing to change your diet, while everyone else in your home keeps eating the same as they always have?

Quit drinking or smoking? Do you stop hanging out with your friends who drink or smoke?

Need to get more done and work harder, maybe go back to school and get that degree at night? What do you give up to get those hours? Time with family? Time with friends? Time just chilling?

Finally, when you see some of that happening and there’s part of your brain that says, “All right! About time!” why is there also part of your brain that says, “Shit, what if this is the wrong move after all?”

Which one wins? Or is this a no-win situation?

James Tiberius Kirk didn’t believe in the no-win situation. Do you?

There might be so many reasons.

Maybe that fish last night was a little bit spicy, or the broccoli was making you a bit gassy. Maybe that had you feeling punkish all night, leading to a lousy night’s sleep.

Maybe there’s an anniversary coming up that you thought would be a cause for celebration, but you’re just not feeling the joy. Or maybe it’s the other way around, you’ve got something going on that you can’t put your finger on and that’s putting off from the celebration.

Maybe you’re feeling overwhelmed.

Maybe you’re feeling under appreciated.

Maybe you miss someone. Maybe someone’s showing up in your head at night and you don’t understand what they’re trying to tell you or why they can’t still be there when you wake up.

Maybe you saw or heard or read something that got stuck down in your subconscious like a burr that wiggles its way deep under your collar on your back. You can’t quite remember what it was or why it bothered you, but you know something’s not quite right.

(You hope that it’s not because you’re a closet asshole. You HATE people like that. Although being that guy and not realizing it would definitely qualify as a burr in the subconscious.)

But you can’t act grumpy at work, because it’s not their fault and it’s not their problem. You shouldn’t act grumpy at home, because, well, the same.

So you put on some good tunes, try to get some work done, maybe try to write a rambling piece on your website, keep smiling, keep putting one foot in front of another, and hope that tonight you either get some sleep or some answers.

Maybe tomorrow won’t be a day you’re just grumpy.

I don’t think it’s laughing with us any more, or maybe it never was. Perhaps we just don’t get the joke.

I’m not a “number nerd,” but this one was a little hard to miss. I’ve been working for weeks on a big project at work (the annual budget for next year) and it’s being finalized today and presented at a big meeting tomorrow. (Yes, on a Saturday.)

I tend to keep my various drafts as I go through a project – you never can tell when you might have to go back and retrieve something that you edited out or changed at some point. The point being that as I’m wrapping it up and generating the final, final copies for distribution, I was working on draft #11.

And today is November 11th.

It was 11:11.

I chose to take that as a good sign. Portents, I’ll take the good ones, we’re drowning in bad ones for the last week or five.

Forty-five minutes later, I got told that there were just two more little changes that my boss wanted. So much for celestial harmonic convergence as expressed in a PDF printout of a large Excel spreadsheet.

And once again, as I type, a skunk has gotten spooked very, very nearby.

Is the lesson that one needs to never give up and keep fighting until the bitter end against impersonal fate and a universe of blind chance, or that one needs to give in and accept and just go with the flow as if a bit of flotsam being shoved about by Brownian motion in the particle-antiparticle foam of a quantum (laughing) universe?

Stupid, freakin’ universe!