Planet Utah

Yes, rental car clubs DO matter

I've blogged about the predictably annoying experience that is renting a car: long, slow lines; insistent questions that are designed to cost you money ("Would you like to upgrade/buy insurance/pre-pay for gasoline?"); having to show more paperwork than a West Bank Arab, etc.

I've often wondered if there was a better way. And I've often wondered whether that better way might be to join one of the rental car company's "frequent renter" clubs.

I can now confirm for you that this is, in fact, a better way--a MUCH better way.

I joined the Hertz and Budget clubs for free, through AAA. First benefit: no standing in line. There's a special line for frequent renters, and there's typically no one in it (though I haven't rented during peak season yet). Second benefit: no hard sell on all of the add-on goodies that you don't need. You fill out your preferences online with respect to insurance, GPS, gasoline, etc., and the counter clerk takes your online preferences as gospel. No additional sales pitch.

Those two changes make a big difference. Now, I just walk straight up to the counter, show my driver's license and credit card, sign and initial some paperwork, and get my keys. The whole process takes no more than a couple of minutes, and there's zero frustration along the way.

Footnote: If you don't have AAA, see if you can sign up for the clubs through your work, or through Costco, or Sam's Club, or some other membership organization to which you belong. Believe me, it's worth a little research.

Oliver Miller sighting

Anybody remember Oliver Miller? He was a big, fat dude who played center for the Suns during a couple of different contract stints. He was a very talented guy who, unfortunately, couldn't stop eating donuts.  He also allegedly enjoyed the company of women in a more forceful manner than the law and the Colangelos allow. So, he left the Suns, bounced around the league for a while, played overseas, ate more donuts, and is now out of basketball altogether.

I happened to be in a Dallas bar on Saturday night when who should walk in but...Ed "Too Tall" Jones. Actually, it was Oliver Miller, but one of the drunken patrons at the bar said, "I think that's 'Too Tall' Jones. I'm going to go ask him."

I watched as the guy approached Miller, and though I couldn't hear the conversation, Oliver allowed as how as he was not Mr. Jones, and then immediately began looking around the room for someone more interesting, attractive, or important to talk to. (This is exactly what happened when I met Dan Quayle back in the late-1990s. And no, I didn't have to look very far. Kidding! I was the one who got the bum's rush. The former VP made eye contact with me long enough to shake my hand and say, 'Nice to meet you,' but then immediately began to scan the room for someone wearing something nicer than a Timex Indiglo.)

After denying that he was "Too Tall" (though he is indeed too tall...about 6'9"), Miller came walking in my direction. So, having had 18 or 19 beers, I looked up and said, "Oliver Miller?" He looked down and said, "Yeah, how are you," but never broke stride. I said, "I'm from Phoenix." (How's that for quick thinking, huh?) That got him to stop. He said, "Oh yeah?", and stuck out his hand to shake, his fingertips reaching down to about my elbow. I said, "Yeah, I enjoyed watching you play," which was lame but true. He said, "Thanks, man," and kept on walking.

Footnote: He left the bar soon thereafter, and did not invite me to come with him, even though I told him I was Tom Tolbert, to whom I bear an unfortunate resemblance.

Tough guys don't want to fight...and they don't need to, either

There's no spiritual, philosophical, or quasi-religious component to Krav Maga, nor is there any aspect of it that is treated as a sport or competition. It's all about the practical matter of personal physical safety. Once you sense that a physical confrontation is unavoidable, you become the aggressor (i.e., strike first), you fight as if your life depended on it, and you don't stop until you're certain the confrontation is over (that is, until your attacker is incapacitated or has given you an opening to escape).

Given Krav Maga's very practical approach--boiled down to its essence, it's about street-fighting--it's been surprising to me that the 10 or so instructors I've met are all very down on fighting. By that I mean that they haven't been in a fight (at least since they began studying Krav), and they don't want to be in a fight.

I didn't really understand either of these things until recently. I went to a special seminar in San Antonio, though, where one of the instructors explained fight-avoidance as follows: "Only bad things can happen."

That's probably an overstatement, but I understand his point. I mean, think about the best case scenario: Someone forces you to fight, you knock them out with one blow without hurting yourself, and that is that.

If that were to occur, most likely it would ruin your evening. (You're not just going to return to light-hearted, beer-soaked banter with your friends after you've been forced to fight someone.) You'll probably get kicked out of whatever establishment you happen to be in, and you might not be allowed back. You might get arrested if someone calls the police. You might get sued by the guy you KO'd. His friends might be waiting for you outside once you leave. One of them might decide to stick a screwdriver in your eye. Etc.

Long story short, even the best case can turn out pretty badly. That's why the San Antonio instructor said, "You want to avoid a fight at all costs."

But then I started wondering, "Do all of these bad-ass instructors really walk away from fights?" So I asked, and the answer is, "Yes." And I thought, "That's crazy! They're going to back down even though they know they could beat the snot out of someone?" Again, the answer is, "Yes."

I had a hard time understanding this at first, but only because I was thinking about it from my non-bad-ass perspective. If you don't know how to fight and someone challenges you to a fight, a decision to walk away usually means (at least in part) that you were afraid. Not fighting, therefore, is an admission of fear...even cowardice. Men don't want to admit fear or physical cowardice, so they fight when they shouldn't--or they walk away under a cloud of shame and humiliation.

Because the tough guys know how to fight, have trained to fight, and have sparred a million times, they aren't afraid of taking a beating.  Walking away from a fight, therefore, is not an admission of cowardice. So, that's what they do: walk away.

It's real or it's dead

I have a total of eight siblings and step-siblings. They've been pretty good about providing a steady supply of nieces and nephews. Some are in college, some are just a few months old.

Last week I got to see a couple of the younger ones--one niece, one nephew. I brought the niece a little stuffed teddy bear wearing a UT sweater. I had wanted to get the nephew a bobble-head armadillo, but the store I go to for Texas stuff was out of them. So, he got a Texas-shaped glass paperweight with a scorpion inside.

When I gave it to him, he seemed intrigued by the scorpion, which is what I had hoped. He asked me, "Is it real?" I said, "Yeah, it's real." He said, "Then how come it's not moving?" I said, "Because it's dead." He said, "I thought you said it was real." I said, "It is."

His sister, my niece, who had been listening to the conversation, stepped in to clarify: "It was real, but then they had to kill it to get it in there, so now it's dead."

So I guess in kid-word, something is either real or it's dead...but not both.

I really did go to Ireland, I swear

I've been saving my Ireland live-blogging for a time when I get blogger's block, but it hasn't happened yet. It will, though, soon enough.

Have I been doing it wrong?

Here's a good quote from Florence King:

A worldly man looks for the woman and then finds love, but the Family Man, like a new subscriber to eHarmony.com, has the love ready and waiting and then sets out to find the woman to go with it.

How I spent my hiatus

So, while I was away the last couple of weeks, I was in...Ireland! That's right, the Emerald Isle, Eire, the Land of Saints and Scholars, the Old Miss, the Old Man, the Mighty Mississip.

I kept notes along the way so that I could be only the second person in Internet history--as far as I know--to retrospectively live-blog a vacation. It sounds oxymoronic, but it can be done. I should know, because I was also the first person in Internet history to do this. (Long-time readers may recall that I live-blogged my London/Scotland trip two years ago...after I had returned to the states.)

That's all for now, but stay tuned for details of the adventure.

The dilemma of the unfinished story

I'm going to be starting my fall break in a couple of days, so this may be my last substantive post for a while. Just a heads up.

So, have you ever been in the middle of telling a story to a group of people when someone, or something, interrupts? You know, you're telling four or five people about your date last night, you say, "Finally, after two painful hours, I'm about to suggest that we call it a night, but then out of nowhere she says, 'I just had the best idea...'"

Just as you're getting to the good part, though, someone's phone rings, or someone interrupts with a joke, or someone new joins the group.  Suddenly, your story is frozen in its tracks, and the momentum and attention of the group seem to be moving in a different direction.

What do you do?

This is always a tough one for me. If I'm telling a story and it gets interrupted, it creates a feeling in me similar to the feeling I get when: a) I'm about to sneeze, but it goes away; b) I stick out my hand to shake, but the person whose hand I want to shake momentarily looks away, and I'm left there with my hand thrust into the void between us, awkwardly waiting to be shaken; or c) I ask someone a question in public, but the person appears not to have heard me, and I'm sitting there wondering whether they actually heard me or not, trying to decide whether I should ask again and risk having them say, "I know, I heard you the first time."

Because having a story interrupted makes me feel this way, and because the only way to get rid of the feeling is to finish the story, I want to swing the attention of the group back to me and my story at the first opportunity.

HOWEVER, if you've ever seen someone execute this maneuver ("Let me finish telling my story..."), you know how needy and pathetic it sounds. Plus, if you do successfully re-focus the group on you and your story, there's the very real danger that you might be interrupted AGAIN before the story is done. If that happens, you've pretty much established yourself as life's equipment manager.

You want to know my solution to this dilemma? Embrace the interruption wholeheartedly. Let's say, for example, that you're telling your story, and someone in your group happens to look over at the TV and say, "Oh my God...did you guys just see that?!" Boom--right there, you accept that story time is over. Immediately, you pivot. You become the PR agent for the guy who interrupted you. You say, "No, what was it?" He says, "They just showed a school bus full of kids plunging straight off a cliff." You say, "Oh my God. Was it real? When was it? Did they say anything about what happened?"

And so on.

Yes, your story has been interrupted, and yes, that makes you feel awkward and uncomfortable, but the group doesn't need to know that. By all appearances, you couldn't care less about your story--you're now fully engaged in the new topic of conversation. You're an active participant, helping to push the new conversation forward.  You recognize that you'll have plenty of other chances to tell your story...but you may never again get to bond with your friends over the horrifying death of a dozen schoolkids.

Dilemma demolished, problem solved...no thanks necessary.

Good setup for a spooky story?

If you were to visit my home, you would find a notepad and pen in every room, including the bathrooms. Why? Well, I'm constantly coming up with thoughts and ideas that I want to jot down before I forget them. If I always have paper and a pen nearby, I can always jot down my ideas.

There's one room, however, that I rarely enter--the guest bathroom. At most I'm in there once a month to do some dusting, blow out the AC vents, and so on.

Well, last Tuesday afternoon, after returning from a long weekend of travel, I went into the guest bathroom to turn off a light that I apparently had left on while I was away. When I entered the room, I immediately noticed that something was different. The notepad, which for nine months had been sitting unused on a shelf next to the sink, was flipped open to the first page. And there on the page, in block letters, were written these three words: WE MISSED YOU.

So, what do you think? All of it's true, except for the part where the notepad had been written on. But when I got home and went into the bathroom to turn off the light, I thought, "How spooky would it be if someone, or something, had actually written on the pad in here while I was away?"

Anyway, if you're so inclined, take the idea and run with it.

Six more weeks of winter

About five months ago I mentioned that I was getting Invisalign. Well, I've got two weeks left before my treatment is complete, and I can tell already that I'm not going to be happy with the final results.

Is there improvement? Absolutely. Do my teeth look the way I want them to look...the way the computer model indicated they would look when I was finished? Absolutely not.

So, here's the choice I may have to make: another couple of months on Invisalign (presumably at added cost, and definitely with added hassle, made worse by the fact that I was really looking forward to having my mouth back in mid-August), or--gasp--MAN-BRACES!

Either option makes me want to cry.

Disclaimer: I realize that wanting to cry over this sort of thing, as opposed to, say, wanting to cry over having been paralyzed in a car accident, or maybe wanting to cry over having a cleft palate that I can't afford to get fixed, is an incredible, almost absurd, indulgence.

What can I say? I'm an incredible, almost absurd, man.