The truth is never a caricature of the facts.

But it is the caricature that is easier to believe, easier to see, easier to sell.

Believing a truth takes faith and trust.

I love Christmas. Whenever it gets to the day after Thanksgiving, I say a small prayer of thanks that I lived one to see one more Christmas and vow that if this is my last Christmas, I will be my best one yet. And when I pack up Christmas right after New Year’s Day, I say another prayer asking that I see another. One year I know the answer will be no.

I have never told another living soul about this. It is weird.

Or so I thought until I saw this trailer for Footnote (you have to watch on their site. Sorry, no embed.) Watch from the beginning, but especially at 1:06. BTW, if you are awake tonight at 3:00am EST, watch.

I think that the perfect way to die is quietly, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, sitting on the sofa looking at the Christmas tree all lit up, with a cup of coffee, my dog laying her head in my lap and “Same Old Lang Syne” by Dan Fogelberg playing on the radio.

I am desperately seeking normal. Normal is where everything makes sense, where things don’t change. Things will be ok again once things get back to normal.

But change happens so that can’t really be normal. So I think normal might be something else.

Normal is when a new pair of jeans finally become soft and falls gently across your hips. Normal is when a new pair of jammy pants quits becoming scratchy. Normal is when your dog lays his head on your lap when you feel sad and is always at your side because he wants to be. Normal is when memories finally become comfortable.

Recently, I read a definition of normal from someone for whom change is constant.

“A steady year.”

I think I like that definition too.

Three weekends ago, my son up and moved across the country to a place I had always dreamed I would end up. It didn’t come as a surprise as he and I had been talking a long time about how he always wanted to live there and how he become just a little more disenchanted with life every time he would visit and return home.

I thought I’d just feel happy for him. But I was wrong.

I was shocked at how angry, jealous and eventually depressed I felt about why him and not me? It didn’t seem right to be jealous of your own child and certainly not angry that he found a way to escape and I had not. In truth, he has less to tie him down. His life fits neatly into one backpack and he has no obligations to anyone but himself. After all, I was the one poking at him to do it.

I remember the joy I felt when he finally learned how to ride a bike. Intellectually, I knew one day he would leave and end up there, but nothing really prepared me for this indescribable and unnamed mess of feelings all tied up in jealousy, anger and depression when he finally pushed off for real.

I realize that part of being a good parent is to spread dreams and give your kids wind beneath their wings, and to park your own dreams when it’s a choice between yours and theirs. I’m ok with that.

For now.

When dreamers hang too long with practical people, dreams become fantasies and fantasies become regrets.

I need to find more dreamers soon.

I am fixing a custom WordPress theme that one of my clients contracted from a whizz-kid twenty-something designer. He got to about 90% of the job done, got bored with the telephone calls and what he thought were endless changes, decided he was done and that was all he was going to do. He didn’t really tell my client that was what he was doing; he just quit answering his phone and frustrated my client into just giving up on him. My client had me who could do the small stuff quickly.

Four days of unplanned works into it and I finally have the site working as originally spec’d. It was a mess because it was coded quickly and amateurishly (though the graphic design was good.) It took me just as long to finish up his last 10% as it would have taken just to do it myself from start to finish. And the only reason — well a big reason — is I didn’t have the time available.

I’m very tired of working with artists and web developers who are only capable of doing the first 90% without getting bored. Yet, that seems like that is all colleges produce nowadays. At any rate, that 10% is going to be very, very expensive.

The next time someone tells you something like “Man, I had a rough day” immediately one-up them and make it about you. Instead of saying, “Sit down, tell me about it” say something like, “You think you had a rough day, I had an even rougher one” and then rattle on about how horrible your day was.

If you could throw in some sarcasm, ridicule and passive aggression in there, that would be great.

Not only will you make people around you small and insignificant, but you will keep them from sharing their hopes and dreams with you as well. In time, they will not share anything and you will almost certainly wonder why.

The Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger. Suddenly they saw a traveller coming down the road, and the Sun said: “I see a way to decide our dispute. Whichever of us can cause that traveller to take off his cloak shall be regarded as the stronger You begin.” So the Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveller. But the harder he blew the more closely did the traveller wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give up in despair. Then the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveller, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on.

“Kindness effects more than severity.”

I didn’t write this. It is an Aesop fable. I heard it on Mad Men last night and just didn’t want to forget the lesson.

Ever notice some people just never move on emotionally from high school? Everything is a social party, a clique where they have to be the center of attention. If they can’t be in charge, they work passively aggressively behind your back to undermine you. Sometimes, the price is a collapse of an entire network of people who want to affect change. While you’re protecting your little hive, the entire ground is dropping away around you.

You could have been bigger than your own dreams if you had only let others in.

Grow up!

Early in my career — but not late enough into it where I knew I wanted out of the corporate rat-race — I worked for a Fortune 500 company. I had a young family then, but worked later in the evenings because the commute took two hours at 5:00pm but only one hour at 6:00pm. I also traveled a lot. As a young executive, you were expected to have a certain level of company loyalty. But the official stance of the company was that you were also expected to practice work/life balance.

I didn’t get paid by the hour, which is a fancy way of saying I was always working. My brain was always working through problems, juggling some program and the politics that went along with it. That’s the part of executive life nobody tells you about, especially your family. As a result, you’re never 100% with your family on the weekends, yet, there was always a “Martha Stewart-like” expectation that you were, which apparently made me a horrible husband and father.

And 5:00pm Friday came around every week and flaunted that expectation you knew you could never achieve. What gave others in our office motivation to duck out early gave me dread.

A long time passing, I still hate 5:00pm every Friday.