Foreign Tooth Fairies

Proudly missing a valuable tooth

A number of years ago, we traveled as a family to visit my in-laws in Taiwan. While there, my younger daughter Roro had a loose tooth fall out. She immediately got justifiably worried because she didn’t think the tooth fairy would visit her in Taiwan. We explained how the tooth fairy visits ALL children, but that led to a big discussion because her cousins hadn’t received visits from the tooth fairy before, and in fact had never even heard of the tooth fairy—we had to explain the whole concept to them.

Roro got even more worried. She didn’t think Taiwan had a tooth fairy and even if she was there, she probably wasn’t very good because nobody knew about her.

But she went to bed anyway, and carefully placed the tooth under her pillow where the lame Taiwan tooth fairy would hopefully find it. She didn’t have much hope, though, and thought the tooth fairy would certainly leave her empty-handed.

Then a dental miracle happened.

It seems that Roro’s aunts were also worried the tooth fairy wouldn’t arrive, so they decided to help out. Without telling anyone else—including each other—they each crept into the room and added a little of their own money under the pillow. This went on all night, with people sneaking into the room and adding to the pile.

The next morning, as we all sat in the living room talking, we heard some very excited sounds coming from Roro’s room. She came running out with a big wad of cash in her hands.

With a huge smile on her face, she proclaimed, “The Taiwan tooth fairy is WAY better than the American tooth fairy!”

A Song of Hope

I was recently in the gym talking, coincidentally, to a guy named Jim, and the Styx song Come Sail Away played on the radio. Thinking about that song, it certainly hasn’t been a great, influential part of my life that inspired or comforted me, or even has great sentimental value. But as I told my friend Jim, it’s interesting how my mode of listening to that song has changed over the years.

I first heard Come Sail Away in elementary school on the little AM transistor radio I used to hang on my wrist. I liked the song because it mentioned starships, and I was really into anything that had anything to do with space. I was so cool because I knew lyrics to a pop song.

But that was just the beginning.

Not long after that, I recall going to a friend’s house and listening to Come Sail Away on his dad’s old 8-track tape player. Actually it wasn’t old at the time, and it was really awesome how some songs would suddenly fade out half-way through the music, then fade back in when it switched tracks. It was state of the art.

Or so I thought.

When I reached junior high school age, another friend had the song on a 45 record, which we listened to often. The good thing about records was how they’d get damaged, then skip and keep playing the same part of the song over and over. Few kids were as hip as us.

But things got even hipper.

In high school, I attended an outing with a youth group where we took a bus to another city. Someone on the bus had the whole Styx Grand Illusion album on a cassette tape and played it repeatedly on his boom box while we all sang along. We had to wait after each playing as he rewound the tape, which was a good thing because it allowed us to catch our breath.

Then I took a breather from the song for a while.

Come Sail Away sort of faded out of my life for about ten years until I bought it on CD as a Christmas present for my oldest daughter. I was happy that she liked a song that I liked when I was young. We’d listen to it together and we’d finally reached the epitome of the digital age.

But I was wrong.

Several more years passed and my two older kids, who’d grown into teenagers themselves by then, joined a youth group outing just like the one I’d done so many years earlier. This time I was the driver in our 8-passenger Land Cruiser. My son pulled out his iPod Shuffle and we plugged it into the stereo via the cassette tape adapter. And once again, all eight passengers—two generations—sang along to the same old song. Come Sail Away had sailed full circle.

But there was still wind in its sails.

As I sit here and write this, Come Sail Away is playing on the same stereo that we used to listen to the CD when my daughter was younger. But this time, my phone is streaming the song from Spotify and it’s connected to the stereo via wi-fi. And my kids—the older and the younger ones— are singing along.

So where do we sail from here?

I’m hoping we can stream music directly into our brain from a satellite. Then we can just think of a song and it’ll play.

Perhaps this “song of hope” does have great sentimental value after all, as I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had.

Come Sail Away on iTunes

Village People

It’s been a while since I posted here, so I thought I’d re-start with a very intellectually stimulating story. A number of years ago, I participated in a humanitarian trip to a small village in eastern Indonesia. Our group of about twenty included retirees, teens, and many in between. We busied ourselves during the day helping install a clean water system for the villagers. In the evenings, we relaxed, spent time with the locals, and shared in each others cultures. Looking back at this experience, it was really a highlight in my adult life, especially the story I’m about to relate.

With no electricity in the village except for a small generator, the community center had the only lights, so we’d often gather there after dinner. One evening, I joined a couple high school kids from our group and we sat on a fence near the community center with several twenty-something men from the village. The villagers didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Indonesian, but we had fun trying to hit things with rocks, attempting to stand on the fence posts with one leg, and other guy things.

Meanwhile, two high school girls from our group, who happened to be sisters, stood on the outside steps of the community center trying to teach a group of villagers an English song. They’d chosen the classic If You’re Happy and You Know It. I’m sure you’ve heard this one: If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands (everyone claps), etc. They struggled getting the point of the song across, since nobody spoke English, but the villagers all readily joined in clapping their hands, stomping their feet, flapping their arms, and other entertaining actions.

Those of us on the fence watched this after having eaten a large dinner that included some spicy beans. At one point, one of the kids with us accidentally made a rather embarrassing bean-related sound.

We all looked at him and his response was something like, “Was that out loud?”

One of the villagers who knew a couple English words, laughed and said, “Katoot. That’s katoot.”

We suddenly realized we had inadvertently learned a very useful Indonesian word. And it was way better than the English word for the same thing.

While this was going on, the sisters on the steps arrived at the verse, “If you’re happy and you know it, show a smile.” But the villagers couldn’t quite get the smile concept, despite the girls pushing the sides of their mouths up until they looked like The Joker.

One of the girls finally turned to us and asked, “Does anyone know the Indonesian word for smile?”

My buddy, who’d just produced the sound that helped us learn the new word, happily obliged. “It’s katoot.”

She thanked him and continued with the song. “If you’re happy and you know it, katoot!”

Of course everyone instantly smiled, so she and her sister assumed it was correct and started dancing while proudly telling everyone to katoot. Soon the whole village was laughing and the girl finally realized something was wrong.

She turned back to us. “Hey, what does that really mean?”

By that point, we’d fallen off the fence, unable to respond.

Happiness is a Flat Pillow

I have a character flaw.

“Just one?” you ask.

Before I reveal the shocking secret about what it is, here’s a little background. While on vacation once, I discovered I slept much more soundly than at home. It wasn’t because of the quiet, well-insulated room. It wasn’t that we’d been walking around Disneyland all day and I was worn out. It wasn’t that we were on a relaxing vacation that we’d paid for months earlier. It wasn’t because we’d chosen a time of year when the lines at Disneyland were actually bearable.

No, I slept well because the pillow was comfortable.

So when we returned home after the vacation, I needed to get a new pillow. I went to Mervyn’s department store and looked at the expensive goose down pillows. They were fifty dollars, so I skipped those and bought a pair of synthetic down pillows for thirty dollars each—one for me, one for my wife.

I was so excited to sleep on my new pillow that I went to bed extra early. But unfortunately, the new pillow was only slightly better than the worn-out pillow I already had. It was way too hard. It felt like I was sleeping on a large yam. Raw, not cooked. I tossed around all night. My wife couldn’t tell the difference between the new and the old either and questioned why I even disliked the old. The next day I took the two pillows back to Mervyn’s.

It’s nice that many stores will let you return almost anything and Mervyn’s graciously took the pillows back. So I bought the fifty dollar real down pillows and returned home with a happy heart.

I went to bed even earlier this time. Unfortunately, I felt like Goldilocks—this one was way too soft. My head sunk all the way to the bed. It was like sleeping on an empty pillowcase with two large mounds on either side of me. I nearly suffocated. My wife switched to the old pillow partway through the night. Once again, I returned the two pillows to Mervyn’s. I think I might be the reason Mervyn’s went out of business.

I gave up on Mervyn’s and went to Costco’s website where I ordered two premium Kirkland Signature genuine down-filled pillows. They cost seventy dollars each and arrived a few days later. These were so light and fluffy that the UPS driver owed me money for delivering them to me.

I think I went to bed around six in the evening this time. The pillow wasn’t yammy. It wasn’t flat. Unfortunately, neither was it much better than the original old pillow I was trying to replace. My wife promptly pointed this out the next morning.

Here’s where my personality flaw came into focus. And it has nothing to do with being picky about pillows.

Rather, I realized I’d just spent nearly one hundred and fifty dollars to sleep comfortably while there must be a billion people around the world that don’t even have beds. How many people can’t sleep because their neighborhood is getting bombed? How many children have nightmares all night from abuse, fear, abandonment, hunger, or disease? And I was worried about a comfy pillow. What was I thinking?

My flaw is that I have an overdeveloped sense of worry for all the bad things in the world that I can’t do anything about, and that aren’t my fault to begin with. I mean, can I really help it that a young girl in Nepal got sold into trafficking? Maybe not, but it still bothers me.

So I returned the pillows to Costco and donated the money to an acquaintance in Indonesia who’d lost her job and had failing health. Then I went to Kmart and bought a pair of seven dollar pillows.

And I slept better that night than I had in a very long time.

Live to Work – Work to Live

We probably all know people that just love to work. To them, an eighty-hour work week is a joy. After a fifteen-hour work day, they rush home so they can open their laptop and do more work. They could have retired years ago, but then what would they do? Watch other people work? The purpose of life is to work, dang it.

While I admire their industriousness, I’ve always thought it’s the other way around—the purpose of work is to provide you with a decent life. And how can you have a life if you’re always working?

To make our life work with our work life, we humans are always coming up with creative ways to schedule things. In the U.S., the standard forty-hour work week traditionally includes eight-hour work days for five days, or five-eights. Some have altered that to four-tens. Then there are four-nines with a half-day on Friday. Or eight-nines plus one-eight with every other Friday off. Or three-tens plus two-fives . . . (brain explodes here.)

I once tried to convince my boss to let me work two-twenties but he didn’t go for that. I’ve also tried to introduce the “diminishing work” schedule—one ten-hour day, then a nine-hour day, then an eight, a seven, and a six. That’s forty hours but you sleep one hour more and work one hour less each day. Maybe a better name is the “emerging life” schedule. Seemed pretty nice to me, but that wasn’t approved either.

Of course, people that don’t work in an office—like police officers, firefighters, train drivers, and others—probably laugh at all these attempts to change our schedules. They often work several days straight with little sleep. And the workaholics that put in eighty-hour work weeks scoff at the idea of working any less than that.

This weekend, the U.S. will switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time by moving our clocks back one hour. Everyone gets an extra hour of sleep for one night. It’s wonderful. For a few days next week, people will actually arrive at work on time—and cheerful.

I think we should do this once a month. On the first Sunday of each month, let’s all set our clocks back one hour. For the first week of every month, we’ll all be much more refreshed and relaxed. After twelve months, we’ll all be going to work at 8pm, so at that point, we can just switch the AM and PM around and start over. We’d all get additional sleep and more importantly, perhaps we’d enjoy life more. Sound like a plan?

How to Become a Hero

Or: An Excellent Way to Make the World a Much Worse Place

This post is much different from my usual posts and it took me much longer to write. It's not about a personal experience. Rather, I’m writing about an interesting way we humans use to pursue our own agendas. Plus, I’m not trying to be funny or entertaining this time, and I don’t even have any photos to include, dang it. And please don’t take this post as me trying to be partisan. This is about humans, not about politics.

The maxim I want to present is this—and others have probably put this much more eloquently:

“If you create an enemy, then vilify that enemy, you’ll become the hero.”

This is an idea I’ve thought about for a long time as I see the way people interact with one another. And I think pretty much everyone does this to some extent, from young kids in a schoolyard to coworkers in an office to political figures with a global audience.

I’m not going to list references and include footnotes and all that, but I’ll give some examples of what I’m talking about. Think for a minute of what you might have learned in Sunday School or history class about the life of Jesus Christ. Whether you believe in His life and teachings or not, you know the story: He taught love, tolerance, and charity, and even performed miracles, but He was still persecuted and eventually murdered. Why? Because He was a threat to the livelihood of the politicians and attorneys of His day (among other reasons). And how did those public figures accomplish their goal? They turned Him into an enemy, then vilified Him as an evil usurper of their way of life, then those public figures became the heroes.

Many have used that same pattern throughout history. Anyone remember a young Nazi named Adolf Hitler? He created enemies—the Jews, the gypsies, the homosexuals (the vernacular of the time), and any non-Aryans. He convinced people that these enemies were evil usurpers of their way of life. Then he became the hero and leader of Germany, and millions of people lost their lives.

Mussolini did something similar through his fascist ideas of biological racism. He created a class of inferior people—the Slavs—and vilified them as barbaric, thus making himself the hero. And of course, the history of that period shows how many people were murdered, imprisoned, or killed during the war as a result.

I live in the state of Utah and our history here shows this very thing. The early members of the Mormon church lived in the eastern part of our country where they were persecuted by politicians and mobs that just wanted to pursue their own agendas. Those early members were peaceful, quiet people who had different religious views than other Christians. But mobs and politicians painted them as evil enemies and drove them from town to town and murdered their leader. Finally, the Mormons left the United States and trekked across the plains to the Rocky Mountains. Fifty years later, when the U.S. was more civilized, their territory joined the union as the state of Utah.

In the U.S, in the 1950s, senator Joseph McCarthy used this maxim to great effect with the political philosophy that became known as mccarthyism. In his case, he created a list of enemies that he claimed were communists. He vilified them as traitors disloyal to the American way of life. As a result, he became the hero and won the next senatorial election. But another result was the many people whose lives and careers were destroyed with no real evidence of them having ever done anything wrong.

Let’s not forget Mao Zedong and his Cultural Revolution in China. In this case the enemies were capitalists and traditional Chinese values and culture. He was so effective in creating a hero cult centered around himself, that children even accused their parents of being anti-revolutionaries and they were sent off to re-education camps. It was a very sad time in Chinese history where many people lost their lives and countless cultural treasures were lost.

I’m sure anyone can come up with more examples, such as the Ku Klux Klan, religious extremists, the subjugation of Native Americans, imperialism during colonial times, racial cleansing during modern times, and the list goes on.

Everyday people, business leaders, and political figures all fall back on this maxim to promote their own agendas. Hate the other party; hate the immigrants; hate anyone that doesn’t speak your language; hate the poor; hate the rich; hate other religions; hate other ethnic groups. As long as people are hating someone else, they’ll ignore your weaknesses and love you.

It’s probably just a simple facet of human nature that we think of those whose opinions we agree with as telling the truth while others are lying hate mongers. It’s also interesting that this is especially noticeable in religion and politics—two areas that potentially touch our lives in very personal ways. The “other guys” are telling lies and spreading acrimony; “my guys” are simply telling the truth.

How is it, though, that people are conned into believing someone is an enemy when they’re really not? Oftentimes the perpetrator uses lies. Other times, they just distort the information for their benefit. But mostly they pander to peoples’ baser emotions of anger, fear, hatred, distrust, paranoia, and similar negative feelings. These emotions are very easy to evoke whereas positive emotions like love and charity are much more difficult.

Using emotion is very effective in many areas. Think of TV advertisements you’ve seen. The frantic car salesman: “Three days only! Hurry! Inventory going fast! You’ll never see prices like this again!” He’s invoking fear of missing out on something, worry, and lost opportunities. Or the opposite with a loving mom lovingly making a lovely casserole out of processed foods for her beloved little loving kids. In this case it’s a positive emotion, but it’s the same idea.

A perfect example of how this works in our modern era is commercial talk shows on radio and television. The purpose of these shows is of course to make money. Many of these hosts make millions of dollars a year and the industry itself makes billions a year. That’s wonderful—I don’t begrudge them the money and I wish I had that kind of income.

But the method they use is not so wonderful. They’ve figured out a great formula, though: portray the other guys as evil—they’re destroying our country and way of life, they’re taking your money, they stole the election—and you evoke those baser feelings of hatred and anger. If someone gets all worked up listening to this today, they’ll be more likely to tune in again tomorrow. And the show continues to bring in millions of dollars. Remember, create an enemy (the other guys), vilify that enemy (They’re Evil! They’re Ruining the Country!), then you become the hero, or in this case, you become rich.

Certainly not all talk shows are like that. Some, including many on nonprofit or community stations, tend to foster more academic discussion and give fair time to all sides of each issue. And even some of the commercial shows invoke one’s intellect and promote the free flow of unbiased information. But most are in existence to make money, and promoting hatred and anger is the easiest way to do that.

How many times in the last decade have you heard someone claim they hate a particular politician? I often wonder, do they really hate that person or just dislike that person’s views? In many cases, it seems they legitimately hate the person, even though they’ve never met before.

Last fall, I read a short essay (written by a talk show host, no less) where the author talked about all the reasons she hated a prominent politician. About half the reasons were lies, many of the rest were gross distortions of the truth, and others were just her opinion. But none of them seemed to be a good reason to hate the person. However, by convincing others to also hate that politician, she was growing her audience and her pocketbook. And we wonder why there is so much divisiveness and anger in politics today. Again, my posting isn’t about politics; I’m just using this as one example.

I’m sure there’s no global solution to stop all the hatred and anger in our world today. I wish I had an answer. I wish I could say I don’t do the very things I’m talking about in this post. The fact is, I find it hard in my own life to avoid these same negative feelings.

But maybe if each person resolved to try to build bridges rather than acrimony, the world would slowly become a better place. Maybe when we sit around the dinner table and discuss the events of the day, we can go out of our way to point out all sides of the issue, not just those we agree with. Maybe first we need to spend time getting to know all sides of the issue. Maybe when we talk with our children and friends about something important to us, we can use less hateful language. Maybe we can make friends with people whose lifestyles are different from our own.

I’ll end this with a quote that reminds us of this very thing. This is from former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking at the Utah Women’s Conference in Salt Lake City on October 11, 2013. The following is from an article in the Salt Lake Tribune.* (Oops, it looks like I did include a reference and a footnote after all, sorry.)

“She said it is easy in today’s world to receive news and blogs only from people who share the same views. If you find yourself with company where everyone ‘says amen to everything you say, you need to find new company,’ Rice said. Sticking only with like-minded people will cause you either to lose your ability to defend your views or the ability to see when you are wrong.

“She added that if people never encounter others with whom they disagree, they ‘start to think of them as stupid or venal because you don’t have the chance to exchange views.’”

Amen to that (ha ha).

* Davidson, Lee. “Condoleezza Rice: World needs U.S. to solve shutdown, partisanship.” The Salt Lake Tribune. The Salt Lake Tribune (Media News Group), 11 October, 2013. Accessed 14 October, 2013. http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/56988325-90/rice-america-lake-needs.html.csp

How to Impress a Guy—Not!

I'm certainly no expert when it comes to relationships, but I have a good story about what NOT to do. In fact, if you're trying to impress someone, do the opposite of this. Luckily for me, this is a story about someone else—I'm really glad I didn't do it. But it did involve me, sort of.

When my wife and I were still dating, we joined a tour group to southern Taiwan. I lived in the north part of the island at the time, where I taught English and did my best to avoid serious responsibility. This tour group was comprised mainly of single young people, and one of those was a girl I'll call Mei, because I can't remember her real name. She desperately liked another young man on the trip that I'll call Yang, for the same reason. Yang, however, had no interest in Mei. I found out later it was due to Mei's drinking problem. She was only in her early twenties, but had a serious issue with alcohol, which often made it difficult for her to impress anyone. But she definitely tried.

We took large tour buses to a small resort village next to a beautiful gorge in the southern mountains. Several dorm-like hotels sat on the very edge of the gorge. Taiwan has constant earthquakes, so you kind of wonder what the builders were thinking. But luckily, the hotels didn't fall off while we were there. Though I think after the following experience, Mei probably wished they would have. The tour leader assigned the guys to stay in one set of dorms and the girls in another.

In the evening, many in the group sat around talking and joking, with Mei kind of hanging all over Yang while she slowly got plastered. He tried getting rid of her, but she wasn't too good at taking hints. Yang finally got tired of the whole thing, and decided to go to bed. I was sleepy by then too, and the two of us happened to be sharing a room with two other guys, so I accompanied him back to the room.

Our room had two double beds in it, and Yang and I had chosen one. I suppose it seems a little odd for me to be sharing a bed with a guy I'd never met prior to the trip, but hey, life was simpler back then. Not long later, the other two guys came in and the four of us soon fell asleep.

After consuming a case or two of beer, Mei eventually decided Yang must be waiting for her to join him. Why else would he have gone to bed? So she walked into our room—which we had unfortunately forgotten to lock—and climbed in bed with Yang and me. Yang quickly scooted away from her and I scooted away from him. She then scooted closer to him, he scooted away, and so did I. This continued until I was squished against the wall with Yang squished against me and Mei squished against him.

All of our scooting wasn't just from the fact that any nocturnal activity would have been a little awkward (it was a pretty small bed). Rather, it was the fact that beer apparently made Mei sweat a lot. Anyone that says "guys sweat—girls glow" hasn't been around a sweaty drunk girl in a tropical climate. It made for a potent stew.

Yang finally gave up on scooting and climbed over Mei then camped out on the floor. Mei continued scooting until at one point she realized I wasn't Yang. So she sat up, looked around all dopey-eyed, then joined Yang on the floor. He of course quickly joined me in bed. This little dance went on for some time until Mei finally passed out, half on the bed and half off. Yang then pushed her onto the floor and we were all able to sleep. If Yang wasn't impressed with Mei by then, I don't know what more she could have done.

At five the next morning, I found out. She jumped up off the floor, tripped over the chair, and stumbled into the bathroom where she proceeded to impress Yang with the most horrible noises I'd ever heard. I didn't know humans could make those kinds of sounds. She stayed in there about half an hour and only came out because a giant beetle the size of a small bird flew into the bathroom from the open window. She screamed, tripped all over the room, then ran outside. Yang quickly locked the door and we were all very happy to finally have some peace and quiet.

And I can tell you, Yang was definitely impressed. I don't know what happened to the beetle.