Note To A Friend Whose Teenage Daughter Has Moved Out

Joel, you don't realize it, but you have a job opening at your house you may be tempted to let go unfilled. I advise against it. The job is drama creator.

Like many guys, you tell yourself there's too much; I'll leave it to the movies; life is sweet without it. Wrong. Like a dog without a job may turn bad, (he will give himself one, and it may not be the one you'd like) an avoidance of drama is a vacuum waiting to be filled, and the drama that finds you, and it will, will be some sort of metaphorical coyote.

You must think deeply on these matters, as Musashi would say.

T-Bone

On the Seinfeld television show a few years ago, perpetual failure George tried to get everyone at work to call him "T-Bone." It backfired, insofar as not only did they start calling another man "T-Bone," they gave George a new name he did not want at all: "Koko."

So I laughed and enjoyed the show, and a few years passed, and I started thinking, and I realized what George had done wrong.

I decided to test my new-found theory in the obvious way: I would see if I could get the guys at work to call me "T-Bone."

First I enlisted a friend, and we performed the pre-planned action only twice. The first time, we walked by my supervisor's office and my confederate said something like "So how was your weekend, T-Bone?" and I snapped "Don't call me T-Bone!" The next day we duplicated this scene in another area of the building, in front of another guy.

 That's all it took. Within two days, I was T-Bone. I pulled the fake-angry thing maybe once more just to set it in cement. After a week or so of being T-Bone, I ended it. I simply told all concerned that they had been unwitting parts of a scientific experiment. This sufficed to nip the whole thing in the bud.

I could have left things as they were, but I guess, unlike the TV character, I didn't really care to be named "T-Bone" at all..