Fluffies

Her Highness, YinYang the First

The Princess is ready for her morningly petting.

T-shirts, introverts and adverts

The past few months I've been on a big T-shirt buying kick. Facebook's algorithm finally figured out something it could sell me - clever T-shirts. And it's gotten to the point where I've had to allocate an online T-shirt-buying monthly budget.

I'm just going to leave this up here. 

It got me thinking. My entire life, I've worn the least flashy, most ordinary clothes in existence. Plain colored shirts and blue jeans or khaki shorts. Boring suits when dress-up time arrives. Anything to keep me from standing out from the crowd - because when you're an end-of-the-bell-curve introvert, attracting attention means attracting compliments and questions, both of which you try to avoid.

My guess is a lot of this goes back to junior high and high school. Half the time, my poor mother didn't know what to do with her introverted, ADD, space cadet of a youngest son as he entered his long 'rebellious teen' stage. I hated 99 percent of the clothes she tried to buy for me (yes, my mom still bought my clothes into high school -don't judge), and so finding clothes for me to wear outside the house was a challenge. Jeans were easy, because ... well, jeans.

 But the only shirts I liked on a consistent basis had advertisements, movies or other fun stuff on them - Spuds McKenzie, the Marlboro Man, Atari, The Goonies, some random Hawaiian surfboard shop, Huey Lewis and the News (one of the most underappreciated bands in our lifetime, IMO), whatever. So that's what I got. And I got a bunch of them, and I wore them. Did I ever wear them - with no preference for the message, genre, or anything else. If it had words and pictures on it, I'd put it on. I was a walking advertisement, although one with no clue of that fact, and those companies may not have picked me as their best spokesperson if they'd had the chance. 

Let's pause a moment to reminisce over those carefree days of the 80's, when you could wear shirts advertising beer and tobacco products to high school. 

One of the big challenges of being an introverted kid is learning how to dress yourself. Introverts are wired differently from extroverts, and to me fashion of even the most rudimentary level has always been a mystery. I'd rather run into a burning building than try to figure out what clothes to wear to a party. But at least now I have decades of experience to draw on. When I was a kid, not so much.

Anyway, I was a long way from the most popular kid in high school, and somewhere along the way my brain may have deduced it was partly because of my clothing habits. In any case, as soon as I started buying my own clothes, I drifted towards the plainest wardrobe possible, and stayed there for another 20 years or so.

A few years ago my friends begin to gift me T-shirts with nerdy designs on them. I loved them, but it was tough to wear them out of the house - in fact, sometimes I would change to a plain t-shirt before going anywhere. (Again, don't judge!)

This suave fellow, not voted Most Popular? I know, right????

But eventually I started wearing them out of my house. Then I started buying them. Like most addictions, the process has been gradual, but somehow I've ended up with a drawer full of nerdy/cool/awesome shirts. In fact, I had to throw out a bunch of my old shirts to make room - which is a bigger deal than you may think as I tend to keep clothes until they fall apart on their own.

So yeah! I'm thrilled to live in an age where I can scroll down my Facebook page, spend $20, and have a cool new T-shirt within a couple of weeks. So thrilled that I don't even mind answering a few questions from strangers about where I got them. In fact, my dream is to bump into Felicia Day on the street one day and have her say, "hey, nice shirt!" If you're gonna dream, dream big, right?

It all kind of makes me wish Mom had Facebook back in the day. If it had been this easy back then, I might have even started buying my own clothes earlier. 

Eh. Probably not. 

More awesomeness

Check out the awesome new comic by my coauthor, Sherry. Includes an update on the book ... yay!

Frog Call Translation

You know you're getting old when ...

The only time you use your shot glasses is to mix hummingbird food.

Happy Independence Day!

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. 

It's unlikely this scene ever actually took place, but Trumbull did a fine job creating it.  

The Watch v. The Band

Last year I bought a Fitbit … and it was amazing.

It did everything - or at least everything I wanted. It tracked my steps, kept up with my sleep, even synced calories burned with MyFitnessPal, the app I use to keep up with my meals and snacks. It was a pedometer with a brain, and the ability to keep a record of my steps taken and hours slept every day made my S heart sing.  

I loved it. Then I lost it. Just like in that old song.

Physically, the Fitbit is just a tiny black cube that nests in a flexible band. If the band becomes loose, as mine did, the cube can fall out … as mine did. I walked a lot of steps that day. You’d have to be very lucky to find something that size when you’re not sure where it dropped, and I wasn’t lucky.

(For the record, I don't blame FitBit for that. Losing things has never been a problem for me.)

I could have bought another FitBit, but why go with the old when there are so many new options on the market? I settled on the Gear Fit, which at that point wasn’t even out yet. It’s a watch instead of a band, and has a big color screen and multiple functions. And best of all, if you have a Samsung phone it syncs right to it.

I pre-ordered one a few days after losing my FitBit. It was more expensive, but it would be worth it, right?

With apologies to Samsung, it’s not worth it. I’ve given this watch a couple of months to grow on me and it hasn’t. The Gear Fit is a decent piece of technology but doesn’t equal FitBit for several reasons.

First of all, the step tracking is off. FitBit put a lot of time and resources into the algorithms for counting steps and it paid off. I’m not sure how the Gear Fit’s step-counting algorithm works except for ‘meh.’ Samsung should have done more research in this area.

The software issues are even worse. Gear Fit doesn’t sync with other fitness apps. It has its own app – actually it has two or three – and they are clunky and buggy.  It also syncs with these apps through your Samsung account, which for me has caused all sorts of login problems and delays. About half the time the results won’t load, or it will load steps from a month ago. They’ve had a few updates but none have really addressed this problem.

The menu is clunky. You have to swipe and touch several times to do anything. Take sleep mode, for instance. To get to the sleep tracking function, you have to turn on the screen, swipe twice, touch the sleep button, touch start, then touch again to confirm start. (Oh, the horror of multiple swipes!)

You have to do the same thing to get out of sleep mode, which is even worse. With the FitBit, you only have to tap the band a few times to enter sleep mode – and if you’re already in it, FitBit will blink twice every time you tap it to let you know. I can’t count the times I’ve gone through a whole day with my Gear Fit still in sleep mode. It even lets you stay in sleep mode when you enter exercise mode, which is just bizarre.

The Gear Fit does have several cool features, like a timer, a stopwatch, and the ability to sync with apps on your phone. And it’s nice to see incoming calls on my watch when I leave my phone in the other room. That way I can ignore them intentionally instead of accidentally. But these aren’t really fitness features. I bought the Gear Fit to use as a fitness tracker more than a smart watch. If I’d wanted a smart watch I would have bought a Gear 2.

Every technology has its bugs – but some of these issues have simple fixes. You can find similar complaints on just about every review published on this watch since it came out, and as far as I can tell Samsung has done next to nothing to fix them.

Don't worry, it's just a figure of speech. I wasn't going to do it ... and it's waterproof, anyway.

I’ve tried to avoid my usual tendency to judge things too early, but my patience is running out. So as much as it would pain me to flush the money spent on the Gear Fit down the toilet, I’m considering returning to the fold and purchasing another FitBit. There’s no doubt (in my mind, anyway) which one is the best fitness and sleep tracker.

But maybe I’ll give it a few more weeks.  Or just wait until I lose the Gear Fit, too. This band is bound to break sooner or later …

Fun with letters!

Most of the time when I think about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test it’s about the F (feeling) and I (introverted) aspects of my ISFP personality. These letters are visible day-to-day and are often in conflict. For example, sometimes my F wants to go out and interact with people and their feelings, and my I wants to stay at home and introvert. The sparks that fly from these internal conflicts can be amazing to behold.

But another interesting letter is the S - or sensing – aspect. My friend and co-author Sherry uses a clever example to illuminate the conflict between that pair of letters:  the way to tell a sense-er from an intuit-er is to see how they cook up a new recipe. Some people follow the recipe item by item, while others use it as a guidebook and throw in whatever (the “routine vs. terror” scenario on page two of this article is classic S).

The recipe example doesn’t always fit. When you do something for a long time, you become more intuitive at it- someone with S tendencies who is also a professional chef will probably not need to follow a recipe. But it fits when experimenting with something new.

To be honest, I don’t cook much, so that experience is always new to me. When I do cook it’s a constant journey back and forth between the stove and the cookbook/internet recipe. I’ve had friends gather to watch me cook for their own entertainment.

According to Myers-Briggs, S’s are around 73 percent of the population – but all my close friends are intuitives. It’s a little stressful sometimes, because I need to have everything planned out, step by step, whether it’s a schedule or a building project, or I am lost. They just do stuff. “Want to go to the movies?” “Sure, what time?” “Who cares, let’s just go when we’re ready.”

It’s amusing even to me. Being an S can be pretty funny, and the greater your sensing tendencies, the funnier it is. Mopping and vacuuming are like mowing the yard – nice, even strokes along a specific pattern on the floor. The same pattern every time. Loads of clothes are washed in the same order every week, and usually on the same day. Sometimes I even make to-do lists that include “Make a new to-do list.”

The real downside of being an S that it can be scary to try new things. Once you’re comfortable with something, you can excel at it – but there’s a tendency to stay in your zone, to do things the same way every time.  You have to push to get past that - and sometimes it can be especially tough to put yourself out there like that when you’re also an introvert.

But at least I’ll always have a to-do list to fall back on.