Postcard from Barcelona

Earlier this month, I visited Barcelona, Spain, on business.  I didn’t get to see any of the traditional sights (the giant cinder block convention center is apparently not quite as visually striking as  Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia).  But I did get the chance to see Europeans in their natural habitat and that is always fun for an ugly American like me.  A few observations…

• Europeans love rules.  I showed up for breakfast at my hotel a few minutes before 7:00 a.m., when breakfast officially started.  All of the wait staff were in place.  The buffet was laid out.  But when I made a move to sit down, I was shooed away.  “We are not open yet,” the girl said, tapping her wrist, the international sign for temporal disputes.  I stood there for another minute or two.  “Okay,” the girl said, finally, and showed me to my table.  One night, a few of us showed up at a restaurant for dinner.  “Do you have a reservation?” the host asked us.  We did not.  He disappeared for several minutes and then, in a show of true generosity, brought us into the dining room — where we were the only people in the entire place.
• Europeans do NOT love clothing.  After nine hours overnight in coach, I took a walk along the beach to stretch my aching legs.  Most of the women were topless and it is just SO not a big deal there.  Janet Jackson flashes her boob at the Super Bowl and America has a meltdown.  Not so much in Barcelona.  The funny thing is that when boobs are on such rampant display, they lose all of their magical, hypnotic  powers.  Sadly, many of the men were in Speedos and one guy was strolling down the beach completely naked.  Nothing magical about that.
• Europeans like to drink.  My company is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and, at the convention center, we invited customers to come by our booth for a little celebration.  In the U.S., we would have passed out “sparkling apple juice,” the beverage equivalent of dry humping, but in Barcelona, they handed out genuine Cava, a type of Spanish champagne.  A few hours later, all of the executives from my company gathered to do a conference call with financial analysts — but not before another round of Cava was passed around. 

I would like to return to Barcelona someday as a tourist.  I visited Madrid many years ago on business, but managed to extend my stay for a few days and really loved it, so I would expect similar success in Barcelona.  I’ll be sure to pack my Speedo.

D is for Divorce(d)

Free at last, free at… Oh, come on, you know the rest, don’t you?  Anyway, as of Thursday, May 7, at about 2:00 p.m., I re-joined the ranks of the single folk.  After 10 years of marriage, I am officially dee-vorced. 

How does it feel?  Well, I am NOT going to Disneyland.  (Can’t afford it anymore.)  But it does feel pretty good.  

It’s kind of like banging your head against a wall.  It hurts, but if you do it long enough, the pain becomes a part of your life — so much so that you no longer even realize that you’re IN pain.  Until you stop, that is, and realize, “Holy shit, that HURT.  My head really fucking HURT for a LONG fucking time.  And now it doesn’t.  And that feels really fucking GOOOOD.”

I am not gloating here.  Basically, I got my ass handed to me in the divorce settlement.  The divorce business (and make no mistake about it, it IS a business) is one of the few in the world where being a man is a distinct DIS-advantage. 

I had a final, blinding moment of clarity about this on the day of my divorce, when I looked around for sympathy and saw my lawyer (a woman), my ex-wife’s lawyer (a woman), the two court-appointed mediators assigned to our case (both women), and the judge (a woman).  One of these things is not like the other.  Oh, wait, it’s ME!  As Kenny Rogers said, you got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, and, son, it was time to fold ‘em.  So that’s what I did.

Still, all is not lost.  I am now poorer in wallet, but richer in every other way you could possibly imagine.  At the tender age of 41, I am REBORN (and rising, baby, always rising).

Having survived this experience relatively intact, I feel obliged to “pay it forward” — to impart the lessons learned along the way to those of you who also will someday stop banging your head against that dreaded wall.  In no particular order, here they are…

• Use a mediator, not lawyers, and, if at all possible, get it done without any of them — It’s a difficult process emotionally, but if you had asked me nine months ago to sketch out the broad strokes of where things would have ended up, I would have come pretty darn close.  Everyone thinks their situation is unique.  Basically, NO ONE’S situation is unique — but people getting paid by the hour have very little incentive to tell you that.  You can spend $50K to figure that out or you can just take it from me.
• Pick your battles — For me, I wanted to have frequent access to my kids.  (Awwwww….)  I was willing to go to the mat for that.  Everything else was negotiable.  No one gets everything they want.  Not even the women. 
• It’s only money — No, it doesn’t grow on trees — not even in the backyard of the dwelling I used to call my home, contrary to popular belief.  But money IS overrated and, like Doritos, you can always make more.  Toward the bitter end, I asked my friend, Liam, for advice.  “If she asks for $50K, give her a hundred,” he said.  His figures were off by a factor of ten, but, philosophically, he was exactly right.  Probably explains why he’s been happily married for about 17 years. 
• Be nice — In the course of getting divorced, there are about 4,000 opportunities to be decent or to be a dick.  Be decent about 3,995 times — not for the benefit of your ex, but for the benefit of YOU.    

So there you have it.  I hope you never need it.

Oh, Sure, NOW Spock Is Cool

I have pointy ears.  There, I said it.

Your ears are rounded on the top.  Mine come to a point.

My mother says that when I was born, the doctor said that my pointy ears could be “fixed” through some combination of baby oil and bandages.  Mom took a pass.  Thanks, Mom!

I was teased mercilessly about my ears throughout childhood.  “Hey, Spock ears!” was a pretty popular taunt.  “Look, it’s Mr. Spock!” was another.  You get the idea.

I did my best to hide my deformity.  Whenever I wore a baseball cap, I tucked the points of my ears under the rim.  On the rare occasion when my hair grew a bit long, I would try desperately to pull a piece of my hair over the points of my ears.

When I was in college, I worked as a lifeguard at the swimming pool in the condominium where I grew up.  I thought I was pretty cool and had attracted a following of young kids who hovered around me all day, waiting and hoping that I would go into the pool and horse around with them for a while.

Jonathan was one of my favorite kids.  He was maybe seven or eight and just a very sweet, smart boy.  One day he was sitting next to me on a pool chair.  He sat up with a bit of a start.

“Do you know that your ears are pointy?” he asked me.

It was very much like that scene in “The Sixth Sense” when Haley Joel Osmet reduces his teacher to mush by screaming “Stuttering Stanley!” over and over again until the poor man has, indeed, regressed back to his childhood and can barely spit out the words, “Shut up!”

“Yes, Jonathan, I know my ears are pointy,” I said as calmly as I could. 

There would be no horsing around in the pool that day.

Today, many, many years later, I love my pointy ears.  I know now that they add character to my ugly mug and, besides, what the hell am I going to do about it anyway?  I wear my hair short and when I wear a baseball cap, the points go on the OUTSIDE, baby. 

All this has come back to me recently with the opening of the new “Star Trek” movie, where Mr. Spock – and everybody else in the film for that matter – seems to reek of a cool that I never could have imagined way back when.

My son, Christian, has one ear that’s a bit pointy.  Son, you are the coolest kid in the galaxy.