Episode 6 — Becoming Super Rog!
February 15, 2025
Prepare to be amused (or annoyed; your choice)!
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My Internet Bride
We're all a little weird, and life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
Dr. Seuss
Every student in my grade school gave a Valentine to every other classmate. We were woke.
My mother bought inexpensive, single-sheet cards festooned with hearts and cherubic cartoon images with messages like: “Happy Valentine’s Day,” or the racy “Be My Valentine.” I’d write my name on the back, slip them into a small wax-paper-like envelope (provided), and randomly write a classmate’s name on the envelope.
On the day of celebration, I glued construction paper hearts and other blunt-nosed scissor-created decorations onto a paper lunch sack (provided), then taped it to my desk. After pretending this was just a typical school day, we circled our desks, trotted around, and delivered Valentines.
Chomping pieces of candy (provided) – the best part of Valentine’s Day to a kid – we read “Be Mine” over and over. In 7th grade I cleverly gave Jean Whipple (my then crush) TWO Valentines – the second a hand-crafted big red heart fringed with lace. Smooth. The duplication was noticed – but alas, did not end in love. Possibly because I had no clue.
Love is suffering.
According to historians, St. Valentine’s Day history and origin are “murky.”
A technical term.
From the time of Emperor Claudius II of third-century Rome, who outlawed young men’s nuptials because single men made better soldiers than men with wives and families (obviously ignoring the combat skills developed during marital disputes), resulting in unlawful secret young lover weddings conducted by a priest named Valentine.
Alas, like so often in married life, secrecy failed. Valentine was imprisoned, sentenced to death, and executed. During his imprisonment, he fell in love with his jailer’s daughter. He sent his love in a letter he signed, “From your Valentine.”
A holiday was born. Allegedly — more murk.
The date – February 14 – is also mired in mystery. Was it the date of Valentine’s execution? Was it the start of birds’ mating season? Was it the Pagan holiday Lupercalia, where men randomly drew a woman’s name from a jar for companionship, celebration, and sex? With many falling in love and marrying.
Great “How’d you meet?” answer.
In 1999 I moved from San Francisco back to my stepmother’s house in New Haven, Vermont.
In 2000, I started internet dating. Digital photography was still rare, but a friend of mine owned this thing called a “scanner;” it could convert a photo into a digital file. Magical. For my dating profile – where I described myself as “fat, bald, and unemployed; so I’ve got all that going for me” – I posted a photo of myself (no need to post people more attractive than me – pretty much everyone) where I looked halfway decent (that’s as good as it gets).
I was holding a Thanksgiving turkey.
A woman from New Hampshire asked, “Are you the one on the right or the left?”
We’ve been married 24 years.
I found my weird.
Happy Valentine’s Day, Brenda!
My Internet Bride
And Happy Valentine’s Day to you all, too! Weird or not.
“Being A Little Weird Is Just A Natural Side-Effect Of Being Awesome.”
Internet
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You Call That Progress?
Investigations Continue
Shifting from blindly writing to blindly planning, I sense, I smell, I feel structure: lurking, creeping, buried.
My dream is to weld Nerdanalys with humor, fusing all I’ve learned about structure from crafting magic clown acts, framing standup comedy routines, composing humorous essays and speeches, earning a Master of Arts in Writing, and working with Anne Helmstedter and my cohorts in The Sellable Book Inner Circle.
Planning is hard.
It smells like work, work I’ve evaded for 70 years.
I’m more ad hoc, ad-lib, improve, “wing it” kinda guy.
As a Bucknell undergrad, I asked one of my Religion (my major) professors for an “Incomplete.” I explained, “You can either give me an incomplete or fail me.”
“You drive a hard bargain. I worry eventually you’ll have two papers due instead of just one.”
Absolutely correct.
Lesson learned, from then on pulled my inescapable all-nighter whenever the paper was due.
The next year, as I was leaving the University Center at midnight, I ran into a classmate who asked, “How’s your final paper going?”
“I’m going over to a friend’s house to start writing it now.”
She laughed. “No, really, how’s it going?”
“Really. I’m starting soon.”
She was aghast.
I had nine hours.
When I walked into class the next morning at 8:45, she shrugged her question. I gave her my thumbs up and held up 2 copies of my 20 page paper – the original and a copy still warm from the copier.
She was awed.
Just minutes earlier, typing the conclusion, I thought: “Now I realize what I SHOULD have written.”
Thanks to that epiphany, from then forward, I wrote a first draft, to figure out what I really wanted to say, planned my paper, and finally wrote a muscular final version.
Just kidding.
I kept stumbling along, dodging due dates, avoiding professors begging for my paper (I once had to explain to Campus Security why I roamed the religion department at 2:00 AM, explaining I was delivering my way overdue paper).
I’m still bumbling, but I do write early and often. I think (hope) I’ve improved, but I’ve still got a lot to learn about a little thing called “planning.”
Wish me luck.
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