My feed reader, like yours, gets lonely on the weekends.

Bloggers have learned from experience that people don’t read blogs when they have time off – they do it at work instead. This has always seemed odd to me as I write my posts and visit other blogs much more frequently on the weekends than during the week. I can barely find time to take a peek at a news site for a few minutes to find out what’s going on in the world while working, so leisurely reading of blog posts isn’t practical.

By the time the workday is done, I’m often too tired to care about what anyone has written, tweeted, or posted to their Facebook wall, so I put a lot of that off until the weekend.

Social Media @ Work

I remember when the biggest gripe I would hear at work was how unfair it was for smokers to take breaks whenever they wanted. The complaining non-smokers felt cheated that they didn’t have the opportunity to freeze their butts off during the winter months or enjoy the legislative and societal ostracizing that smokers endure year round.

That’s all changed.

It’s no longer necessary to leave your desk to take a mental break since almost everyone is connected. There are some holdouts though. I know one woman who has made it her mission in life to not be on the Internet. She’s one of the few people that I know who won’t show up in a Google search of her name.

My own behaviors have changed too. I won’t try to write a post during work hours, but I do respond to comments. I’ll check my Twitter stream and post a tweet or retweet someone. My personal email accounts are delivered to my phone along with my work emails, so I scan those as they come in. I’ll even watch a YouTube video if someone sends me a link.

All of these intermittent interactions are the new water cooler dynamic. It’s not as if there was no interaction with coworkers and the outside world before we had smartphones. It’s just gotten a whole lot easier.

But there are dangers.

In moderation, I don’t think that these brief interactions degrade our work performance. The opposite may be true. Fixing our focus on one thing for too long, even work, can diminish our effectiveness. Taking brief breaks can help to keep us sharp. Unfortunately, there’s nothing moderate about the Internet. Social media can be very addicting.

Last year, a former colleague shared his desktop during a WebEx conference call. When the call was over, he forgot to end the session, so his desktop remained on my screen. He clicked over to Facebook and began scrolling through his timeline. Once I stopped laughing, I called to let him know. He was a little embarrassed.

My daughter thinks it’s funny that I proofread almost everything – emails, text messages, and even tweets – before I send them. There are too many examples of people who have gotten into trouble because they haven’t done just that.

I should add IMs to my proof-before-sending list.

We use IM in my office. It’s an effective way to communicate, especially when multitasking. On a call and need an answer to a question? Use IM and have the answer in seconds. It’s pretty nifty. But IMing at work leads to using it for more social reasons like banter, gossip, or bitching about someone or something. This is pretty harmless until you type that not-so-nice comment into the wrong window. Oops, sorry!

What do you think? Has being connected enhanced or harmed your work productivity? If you have a related embarrassing story, by all means, please tell it below.

Magnets are fun.

Hold one in each hand and they snap together – clink! Pry them apart slowly and you can feel them seeking each other out as they struggle against you until they are rejoined. That’s how it is, in the beginning, when the two of you hold hands.

Now turn one around and they repel each other with the same force that had just been pulling them together. That’s how it feels when things start to go wrong.

Anticipation is impatience without the attitude.

She takes an extra thirty minutes to work on her hair. Who cares? Losing a reservation is not like missing a meeting with your probation officer. She’s doing it for you! So you wait and you don’t complain. The long ride out to see her doesn’t seem long at all. If it were a friend asking you to make that trip, you’d probably think about it before saying no, but to see her you just get into your car and go.

Music is joyous until it isn’t.

There always seems to be a song that reminds you of her. She must have one too. From the first notes your heart feels a jolt and you are taken back to a moment, a smell, and a kiss. You wish that you could grab on to that moment and stretch it out indefinitely, but it is fleeting, just like the song, the smell, and the kiss.

Life is full of left turns.

All seems well until you, or she, makes a turn. It could be a conscious decision or just one of those things. You never really know. Now the two of you are headed in different directions. It doesn’t have to be a big turn, like a move across the country, the reappearance of an ex-lover, or a Chris Brown type of meltdown. In fact, it probably wasn’t big at all. It’s the little things that do in relationships – in the end.

But the two of you are constantly in motion, with each making decisions along the way. All it may take is for one person to stop turning for a second while the other catches up with a left turn or two of their own.

You have a one-in-four chance to end up on the same path, so keep looking around the corner until you find each other again.

It’s probably worth the effort.

I know a lot about spreadsheets.

It’s not the type of thing that most would consider to be a claim to fame, but man, can I make those numbers come to life!

Creative formula writing and knowledge of accounting principles combined with years of practice has been invaluable to me in my career. More importantly, I like doing the work. A database is not just rows and columns of bland data; it’s the beginning of a challenge – a dare of sorts, from me to me.

I can make this stuff understandable for the non-accountant.

Now that’s a lofty ambition to have, eh?

I think so. In business, communication is key. If management is paying attention to the wrong things, the business will suffer.

In this hyper-social world, I go the other way.  Give me a problem and the data to work with… then leave. (<–tweet this)

I’m at my best when I’m alone in my darkened office with only the glare of the monitor lighting my desk, smooth grooves playing in the background, and my phone turned off. When I emerge, my creation will be flexible, scalable, and of course, always deliver accurate results.

Oh, I’m getting all tingly just writing about it.

Despite the success that I experienced by taking this approach to work and working, something bad happened several years ago. I started to notice that others were placing me in a box. The box was formed by using lots of complimentary terms: The Excel Wizard, Mr., Excel, The Man, etc. At first it was nice, but…

… a gilded box is still a box.

I was going to school at the time, working to broaden my management skills so that I could advance. Ultimately, it took a change in jobs after graduation to begin to be recognized as being good at more than just one thing. I didn’t want to leave, but there didn’t seem to be any point in staying any longer.

Leaving my comfort zone, I took a chance. Escaping from the box has been hard at times, as prospective employers have not always been keen to my many talents. But like Pai Mei’s student in Kill Bill Vol. 2, I punched at the lid of the box until I broke free.

I know a lot about spreadsheets, but looking beyond them has taught me a lot about me.

As kids who loved baseball, we should have been able to hit those mice at least once.

Someone from my grade school in Brooklyn started a Facebook page. I came across it and joined last year. I attended Fourteen Holy Martyrs from second grade through the beginning of the seventh grade, so I was twelve years old when we moved to The Bronx in the fall of 1972.

The second floor walk-up, with the bathroom in the hallway, provided me with a no-frills base on which to form my perspective on life.

There were seven of us in that apartment, Mom, my four brothers, Tony, Raoul, Ralf, and Radi, my sister, Malta, and I. Privacy was never an option. The school was only a half block away.

Memories fade, so it’s not surprising that I remember the names of only a few of my classmates. Looking over class photos posted on that Facebook page yields only the vaguest of memories, so my recollections of that time can only be shared from the bits and pieces of information that have stayed with me over the forty years that have been lived since.

I remember the mice. My brothers and I would try to clock them with our shoes and sneakers from our beds. Those rodents would emerge from the spaces between cabinets, seemingly without fear. This was their apartment.

I remember the roaches. You couldn’t avoid them – especially at night. My Mom was always cleaning. She fought a long but losing battle to keep them at bay. She couldn’t get them all.

I remember doing everything together. The neighborhood was rough and Mom would not allow us to become “street kids”. Only bad could come of that, so we did a lot of inside things: board games, TV, books, roughhousing, and things like that. Straight to school and back was our routine. Given the variety of trouble that my brothers and I could have gotten into if we were given more freedom to roam, I’d say that Mom made a good decision. I was ecstatic when we moved to the Bronx to an apartment building across the street from Crotona Park and its baseball fields, swimming pool, and handball courts. Sports filled my non-school hours for the years that followed.

I remember Father Hugo Bedoya; we just called him Father Hugo. He was a smallish man with a kind disposition. I was an altar boy who sometimes visited him in the Rectory.

I posted a comment to the Facebook page asking if anyone had heard from him. One person LOL’d and wrote that she didn’t think anyone remembered him. Another person wrote: “Boys don’t have positive memories of Father Hugo; I’ve never heard anyone else tell stories.”

Those comments have bugged me ever since. As a Catholic, I’m angered by how the Church hierarchy perpetuated the abuse of children by transferring offenders and otherwise ignoring allegations for many years. Unlike some of my fellow parishioners, I’ve never condoned their approach. There could be no punishment stern enough to make up for the damage that has been caused to so many lives.

But now that one of the accused is someone who I remember fondly, I’m conflicted.

I Googled him and learned that Father Hugo was named in a $300 million dollar lawsuit with 23 other priests in 2003. The suit had been brought on the behalf of 27 complainants whose experiences with the priests spanned four decades, the 1950’s through the 1980’s.

The suit claims that Bedoya sexually abused an altar boy between the ages of 9 and 11 while stationed at Fourteen Holy Martyrs in Bushwick. The abuse allegedly occurred in the rectory, in the “ready” room before mass and on a church-sponsored trip. The suit alleges that, in addition to other odd sexual behavior, Bedoya examined the genitals of his altar boys to make sure they were clean.

Bedoya, contacted at the Immaculate Conception Center in Douglaston, referred calls to diocesan leadership.

Source: Keach Hagey, Queens Chronicle, October 9, 2003, New Bishop Inducted As Diocese Faces Yet More Claims of Abuse.

I found this article repeated on numerous websites including BishopAccountability.org, which also contained a searchable database of publically accused priests. The only thing missing, at least in the listing for this case, was the disposition.

I’m not about to make any claims against the person who alleged abuse at the hands of Father Hugo – I wasn’t there. Only they know what happened or didn’t happen. I can only tell my story.

I may have been a perfect candidate for an abuser since I was a fatherless, introverted boy who respected authority, but things are not always as they seem.

Father Hugo and I had several talks. During one visit to the Rectory, with the aide of a health textbook, we discussed hygiene. Father Hugo asked me if I was circumcised. I was not. He went on to instruct me on how to pull back on the foreskin in order to clean away the smegma that can accumulate underneath.

With no father at home, I had not been taught this.

We also talked about sex and reproduction, much as would be taught in school, again while referencing diagrams in a health textbook. He spoke of cleanliness and responsibility. Father Hugo advised me to continue the conversation with my mother at home.

I remember following his advice. Mom was washing dishes and I stood beside her. I began by telling her about my conversations with Father Hugo and then I asked her a question about sex. I don’t remember what the question was, but I remember her answer.

“Don’t talk about these things again.”

Moms can’t be expected to be good at everything.

My question must have surprised her and made her uneasy. Looking back, I’m glad that Father Hugo took the time to educate me in these matters, because it wasn’t likely that I would have learned those lessons from anyone else.

What are we to make of this single claim of abuse? Other priests who have been exposed as abusers routinely have scores of accusers. Could Father Hugo have done what he has been accused of doing? Of course he could have, but what if he didn’t?

We will never know. I searched the Queens Supreme Court database to learn the disposition of the case. It was dismissed on August 23, 2004 when the court accepted the defense’s motion to dismiss the charges on statute of limitation grounds.

Not all stories have satisfying endings.

A big fear that I have – aside from obvious things like being able to provide my family with food, clothing, and shelter – is that no one will miss me when I’m gone.

It’s an inane fear, I think, because when that day comes I’ll probably be unaware of whether I’m thought of constantly, occasionally, or not at all. Still, the uneasy feeling persists.

We all want to leave something memorable behind.

Going through life as an optimist has one major drawback. Believing that tomorrow will be a better day can sustain you through tough times until your tomorrows start to feel like yesterdays. You use your age as an excuse for not starting something new more often than you ever had before. You spend your time looking back instead of ahead, wishing you could alter the unalterable, as another day gives way to night, leaving one more day’s worth of things undone.

I’m not unique in this, I know, but when assessing one’s own life, the perspectives of others don’t count.

Not to worry. Having these thoughts isn’t leading me toward the abyss. They are just reflections of a life half-lived from a guy who has lived his life less boldly than warranted. And why is that?

There is no upside to timidity.

Many of us shy away from opportunities until those opportunities expire.

It’s been a life-long dilemma. Sometimes, I’ve been able to break through shyness, apprehension, and plain old fear to do the things that I wanted to do. Each success should have caused me to be less fretful the next time. That would have made sense, but that’s not what has happened.

People are not sensible creatures.

Each new challenge brought with it the same insecurities that I’ve felt since I was a boy, causing me to battle those fears ferociously just to get to the beginning. The energy expended in this exercise always leaves me wondering if I could have done more if I wasn’t preoccupied in this way.

The shyness that is so adorable in children, should be left behind with other childish things if we are to reach our full potential.

This brings me back to my big fear. There are so many thoughts in my head that I have not allowed out. I cling to them as if they have value only as secrets between me and my Maker, but the opposite is true.

If I love you, I should let you know. If I am angry with you and I don’t say it, how can I blame you if you seem unfazed? Telling the truth, my truth, should never be tempered with cowardice – it loses all credibility.

If fear keeps me from trying the next adventure, taking the next step toward achieving a goal, or saying exactly what’s on my mind no one will ever know what I have to offer. Of course, the things that I offer can be embraced or dismissed by others, but only if I put my thoughts and myself out there.

After fifty-one years on the planet, you’d think that I’d know that already.

I couldn’t tell you if it was thirty-two degrees outside or sixty, whether it was raining or not, or if the sun had bothered to come up at all. I didn’t care.

All I wanted was for the pain to stop.

No position was comfortable for more than a few minutes, although I swear I tried them all. The bed, the floor, the chair – each locale was as joy-free as the last. Covers on, covers off. It didn’t seem to matter as I felt both hot and cold at the same time.

A scheduled test was abruptly cancelled because of an “abnormality” found in my blood work.

“Keep your same appointment at my office,” was what I was told, even though that appointment was more than two weeks away. It’s hard to know what to draw from that. Something’s wrong, but it can wait? Is it because the thing that is wrong is no big deal, or is it because there’s nothing that can be done about that thing? These aren’t the types of thoughts that should be on your mind when you’re already feeling helpless and ill.

Are they?

It started on the evening of the 17TH. While on my way to the company holiday party, I felt a sharp pain in my lower back. I’ve strained muscles before, so I knew that wasn’t it. It was a different kind of pain that moved from my lower back to my right side beneath my belt and back. I pulled off the road to stretch, but that did nothing.

There’s no accounting for how the mind works. I had missed the last two parties and was going to this one solo. I didn’t want to miss it again, so I got back in my car and continued my two-hour drive.

“It’ll be fine,” I thought.

Trying to chit chat during the cocktail hour proved pointless. I could barely stand. Ten minutes later, I let someone know that I was leaving. All I wanted to do was make it back home.

Forty minutes later, I admitted to myself that I could not keep driving when I spotted a police car on the side of the road. He was writing someone a ticket, so I pulled in behind him and honked my horn. It was dark, so I wasn’t surprised to see the officer approach my car with caution. I didn’t think to turn on my dome light. That might have helped.

I explained my situation while staring into his flashlight. I could barely see his face, but I sensed the tension ease when he understood that I was in distress.

“Just relax, sir. The ambulance is on the way.”

My wife and oldest daughter found their way to the distant hospital with ease. I’m glad that I bought my daughter that GPS a couple of years ago.

“Kidney stones,” was the diagnosis I received after the CAT scan.

I was discharged that evening and referred to a urologist who explained the treatment that was to occur after some additional testing – first a blood test, then an IVP (intravenous pyelogram) test with a radiologist – the latter was the one that was cancelled because of the abnormality. That’s when my mind began to wander.

The drugs prescribed by the emergency room doctor, and later by the urologist, helped manage the pain, but there was one side effect that I could not ignore. I couldn’t go. A call to the doctor yielded only advice to try over-the-counter remedies, which weren’t working. I stopped taking my prescriptions. By the tenth day, I would have given anything just to go. Talk about being focused on one thing!

The fifth remedy I tried finally worked.

The original pain from the kidney stones has subsided. Aspirin alone has been sufficient in moderating the discomfort. But I’m tired all of the time. And there’s still the matter of the blood test result. It makes you think.

Thinking is bad.

On Friday, I’ll know more, but until then, I will go about my business, as if all is well.

Maybe this story will be a reminder to you as it has been for me: Take nothing for granted. Tomorrow is promised to no one and uncertainty is the only thing that we can count on.

Happy New Year, my friends…

… live, love, do.

There’s nothing radical about going to work every day.

Of course, that presupposes that you have a job to go to. An increasing number of us do not. For me, that’s the whole point of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

People are not radical – especially as we get older and take on more responsibilities. That’s just the way it is. It’s hard to imagine carrying a sign, chanting slogans, and risking arrest when we are busily running as fast as we can to keep that hamster wheel spinning.

JP Morgan Chase doesn’t care if the social fabric of the country is disintegrating; your mortgage payment is due on the 1ST. Your boss expects you to keep your focus on the bottom line. Your children need things that you must provide.

Who has time to protest?

We are overworked, overwhelmed, and scared to death of falling off the wheel.

We leave the risk-taking to the young. They have nothing better to do, right?

It’s okay to admit it. Most of us are not cut out to be heroes. It’s easier to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the few while we try to make our own way. Unemployment is just a number to those who are employed – it holds no more importance than a batting average or a Neilson rating. We hear the number, we shrug, and we move on.

But to the unemployed, it means everything. When millions are looking for work that isn’t there, the future looks bleak.

For years, there has been a whittling away of the social safety net. It’s a net whose first strings were strung when the country was at its fiscal worst. We learned what can happen when the economy goes to Hell, so we took steps to avoid a repeat in the future.

Good idea.

Then it happened. The rich began to feel that they weren’t rich enough. They used their wealth to game the system. Too many politicians have a price, and Wall Street was able to meet it. How else can one explain the repeal of laws that were enacted to keep the greed of bankers in check? It’s commonly believed that banks took too many risks which led us into a recession. Bullshit.

There was no risk involved in what they did – at least not to them. They were golden from the start. It was an ingenious plan:

• Lie, cheat, and steal from investors as you package bogus mortgages and sell them as if they were bonds.
• Get the ratings agencies to bless your offerings with AAA ratings and collude with insurance companies to cover your butt when the crap hit the fan.
• Call in your markers with all of those politicians that you “carry in their pockets like so many nickels and dimes,” by lobbying for and getting huge bailouts. (Apologies to The Godfather.)
• Gouge consumers, toss them from their homes by the millions, hoard cash, and continue to devise new schemes for ripping people off.

Do we really need more reasons to be angry before we actually do something about it?

I’m not headed to downtown Manhattan today. I’m not proud of that, but there are other things that we can do to support the activists and it begins by paying attention.

There are no excuses for being uninformed. Even the media is slowly recognizing the movement. There’s something happening here. You don’t have to go to Liberty Square yourself, but you can Tweet it, blog it, or spread the word with some good old-fashioned talking.

My thoughts are with the activists and my check is in the mail.

They are fighting the good fight. If they are successful, society will benefit. If they are bullied into submission, or starved out from lack of support, each of us who chooses to stay on the sidelines will own a part of the blame.

The woman told her story with such clarity that she could have been speaking of something that was just experienced.

The details, the guts of any compelling story, had the ring of a yarn told and retold over the years. She spoke of her remembrances of September 10, 2001.

I was on my way home from work yesterday and had tuned in to NPR and caught their All Things Considered program: “The Day Before America Was Interrupted: Nine People Recall Sept. 10, 2001”

A man from Omaha, Nebraska was next. His story was just as detailed.

For those who lived through the horrors of September 11TH, the memories of that day are indelible. The chronology of 9/11 – where we were, who we were with, and what we felt at each point of that dreadful day are vividly replayed in our minds, especially when the sad anniversary nears.

Buy what about the day before?

As I listened, I strained to recall my “day before”. I could think of nothing. I realized that I had absolutely no memory of September 10TH. It’s funny how the mind works. It’s as if the immense sorrow of 9/11 has commandeered the available space of my brain for that period of time.

This is a three year old video that was recorded on a cheap webcam, so the image is grainy. Seven years after the attacks, I spoke of what I remembered about that day. I made no references to September 10TH.

Ten years later, what do you remember about the day before?

A few minutes ago, I learned of a contest that’s running on About.me. Jon posted a tweet that caught my attention.

The About.me contest to get your face on a Times Square Billboard is one of the most narcissistic things I've ever seen on the Internet.

August 23, 2011 6:31 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@JonMwords

Jon Mitchell

I went to my profile, read the contest rules, and clicked the Opt-In button. That was the easy part. The hard part is going to be using my powers of persuasion to get you – yes, you – to click on this link and cast your vote.

Go ahead. It’ll open in a new tab, so you can come back to this post when you’re done.

I’ll wait.

There, that was easy, wasn’t it? Please be sure to tell me that you’ve supported the narcissist in me, and know that I love me you, my loyal readers.

Okay, back to the story.

After opting in, I was presented with options for spreading the word, so I started by tweeting this:

Want to scare the children this Halloween? Vote for me to be the face of @aboutdotme on a Times Square billboard: http://t.co/w2nPSkX

August 23, 2011 6:38 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@RamonEColon

Ray Colon

@RamonEColon Do you have the balls to ask people to vote for you?

August 23, 2011 6:39 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@JonMwords

Jon Mitchell

@JonMwords Just did. :)

August 23, 2011 6:40 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@RamonEColon

Ray Colon

Now all that’s left for you to do is to spread the word by sharing this post. Think of it as your good deed for the day.

Jon was right, you know. This contest is narcissistic at its core, but these days, that’s what passes for normal.

I tug at the clips until they snap together.

When the held breath is let go, my waistband feels like a truss. I haven’t worn this suit since the last funeral and I’ve put on a few pounds since then. There is no give in the material. My back begins to hurt, but I’ll just have to deal with the discomfort for a few hours because it’s time to say goodbye.

The drive is long and lonely. No music plays as snapshots of memories fill my mind. There are smiling faces in most of them.

She was a happy person, always friendly and welcoming. Many people will be there to say goodbye to this lovely woman who was the wife of my best friend.

Robin died last weekend.

They had love in that marriage. It was the kind of love that poems and songs are written about. It’s easy to forget that bonding like this between two people still happens, but it does. It was probably good that they met later in life, with much of the silliness of youth behind them. John was lucky to find her. Robin was lucky to find him. Their love affair lasted fifteen years.

They were inseparable, until now.

I find it impossible to think about her and their marriage without thinking of myself and mine. Of all the things that we yearn for in life, connectedness with another soul is the most important. We may not always remember this, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Sharing our lives with a special someone, being intimate with our thoughts and feeling safe when we are, and knowing that we face the world as one makes everything else seem trivial.

We had that once, and I believe that we still could, if only…

There is stubbornness in the world, lots of it. Marriage can be hard. There are plenty of opportunities in a relationship to inflict misery on one another. Hurt feelings are worn like badges of honor, but there is no honor in holding a grudge.

Funerals are a time for tears. For some, they are tears of mourning a lost love. For others, they are tears of having thrown love away. How impious it must seem to He who made us that couples should act in this way.

But they do.