Woody Cavenaugh

One of the things I love the most about the holidays is it gives me an opportunity to connect to extended family members that I only get to see one time a year. It is probably also one of the only times you can have a professional journalist, a chicken farmer, a retired sewing machine mechanic, someone from the district attorney's office, and a fencing coach in the same room at the same time. There is always something to talk about when these events happen. Good times, and I am sure you all know I am sincere when I say that. Family is important to me.

But there is an odd thing that happens this time a year. It is like some sort of weird holiday based amnesia, or at the very least some good old fashioned holiday hypocrisy. I have never had a friend or enemy that didn't at some point put on their Captain Obvious tights and let me know that perhaps I could stand to lose a pound or hundred. With family, becomes a greeting. "Woody, great to see ya! I'm glad to see you are still eating well." Inevitably, if they have a gift to give me they will give it to me with sincere warmest wishes. I will accept it gratefully and count my lucky starts that I have family members who loves me enough to think of me and mine on the holidays.

Now, gifts come in two kinds. There are gifts for those close to you that were chosen carefully, with great thought that often answer a desire or need. There are also gifts for those you care a great deal about but you only see them once a year and don't have a real since of their wants or needs. You give this gift as a gesture of love and kindness and you mean it from the heart. Iit is generally a scattershot sort of gift though, one where you make up seven or so little gift bags all just alike. Nothing expensive, because you don't want to force the receiver into feeling like they owe you something back. These too are wonderful gifts.

The funny thing about family is that they can don cape and cowl and tell you in their best Captain Obvious way that you are infact still needing to cut back on the number of arctic seals you have been gobbling down each day, and in the very next breath, say "Merry Christmas" and hand you a gift bag filled to capacity with every known combination of sugar, coca, partially hydroginated somethingorother, and fat.

I have come to the understanding that what they are really saying is, "You are, have been and always will be a tubby butt. We love you, don't ever change." So next year, when I see you, and I hand you a gift bag filled to the top with Twinkies, I want you to understand, I love you, you need to eat a damn Twinkie or five, and you should start right now!

Happy Holidays,

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I've been mulling this over for days and its time for me to get it out of my system. As a species we are a truly egotistical bunch. We have decided that we are the most intelligent species for precisely the same reason that all the other species knows we aren't. We even went out and defined "intelligence" in a way that put us on top. From dictionary.com:

in·tel·li·gence (n-tl-jns)
n.
1. The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, especially toward a purposeful goal.
2. An individual's relative standing on two quantitative indices, namely measured intelligence, as expressed by an intelligence quotient, and effectiveness of adaptive behavior.

We decited that we were #1 on Earth mainly because of our tool use and our ability to create tools for the purpose of killing ourselves and every thing else. Nice. We are the only species on the planet who absolutely cannot survive without tools, and we are proud of this? Go out and find the most primitive tribe you can think of, I'll wait. They wear cloths of some description, they have a tool for killing animals, they have tools for making tools, they have fire, and tools to shelter them from the elements. Take those tool away and they have to go out and make more tools or die.

Lets talk about our place on the food chain. Do you know our #1 method of not being eaten by larger things? We avoid being where they are. Should that fail, we have tools guns, knives, spears that will hopefully allow us to survive an encounter with them.

This egocentric thing goes in other directions too. Ask someone in the street if the giants mentioned in Greek mythology were real and you will most likely be told "no". If you are really lucky they will offer to pray for your soul for even asking the question. Now go out and ask someone on the street if the giants mentioned in the bible were real. Most likly you will get a different answer. Funny that. I think that giants walked the earth only because so many ancient cultures mention them. Same with little people. Most cultures have myths of little people, the man on the street will deny it, even after some skeletons are found in an island cave.

This leads me to monsters. Monsters are nothing more than animals we haven't put in a musieum yet. Witness exibit Coelacanth. Ok, probably not the horrible man eater of lore. How about this. Today we have people claiming to have seen fantastic creatures that they swear were there. They are ignored as lunatics because there isn't one stuffed mounted, and documented in some musieum somewhere. At least the spirits of ancient seamen are exonerated by the "discovery" of the giant squid. While I am on the subject, there is no such thing as dragons right? Of course not, that would be silly. What about the musieums full of giant lizard things? Those aren't dragons, those are dinosaurs. Ohhh silly me! It should be so obvious. It is a pretty much accepted fact that man and dinosaurs never met across the dinner table. If so why do the myths and lore of so many different cultures mention them?

If monsters are animals not yet featured in a musieum than magic is nothing more than science we haven't figure out yet. I would say that if knowledge is a giant box of tangled string than we are pulling slowly on one piece and tossing asside any pieces that distract us from our one thread. Our science works this way. Do an experiment a thousand times, if the same result occures each time it is probably a fact. If once out of the thousand comes out completely unexpected, we toss that out as a mistake. If an archelogist finds something where it isn't supposed to be, it is cast asside as meaningless and work goes on.

We have an egocentric view of the way things are and are supposed to be. Anyone who tells you "We are alone in the universe" is a prime example.

Douglas Addams understood all of this when he wrote in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that man was the third most intelligent species on the planet and not the first like they believed. The book was fiction, the cutting observations that made the book a classic maybe not so much. If you are still feeling all high and mighty, when you get home from toiling at the workplace, sit down and pet your dog or cat, who has spent the same day living a life of complete luxury while you were out, and tell them how completely stupid they are.

Sara always said that if there was such a thing as reincarnation, she hoped to come back as a well loved house cat. I have to admit, it sounds better than being a middle class human. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get back to work to raise the money to buy cat and dog food.

Posted by Woody Cavenaugh at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As sure as falling leaves means that cold weather is on the horizion, the holiday season brings forth these little thirty second fantasies on the boob tube. Loved one opens little gift box under the tree to reveal a set of car keys the open the door of the middle class surburbian dream and a big shiny red bow is on top of some new vehicle or another. The implication always is that if you give your love one a car for christmas they'll put out or something but that's not the great fantasy I am talking about.

Do you or anyone you know have the ability to just pop out Christmas eve and put a spiffy new car on the old visa check? Don't think I didn't notice that the ads all clearly show that the mega gifter paid the extra hundred for the gi-normous gift wrapping service at the dealership.

These are cars most of which cost more than my house. This is definately not a trip down to the general store for socks and a stick of horhound candy. Why do these marketing types think we are going to respond positively to their little fantasy of impulse buying items that the average American needs six years just to pay for?

On the one hand we have the government trying to make sure that every American has a TV and high speed internet (still waiting for my high speed internet) to keep the poor content, while on the other hand you have these marketing bozo's reminding us of all the things we can't have making us discontented and even more aware that we are infact poor.

When the revolution comes, I'm going after the marketing industry. Ruin my holiday fantasy will you....

Posted by Woody Cavenaugh at 9:25 AM | Permalink

Yesterday was the Cavenaugh family reunion. It is held where it pretty much always was where the Cavenaugh's settled in 1800. The reason for this is that since 1800 only a handful of Cavenaugh's ever left. Duplin county has a lot of "C"s in its phone book.

I have been going to the family reunion for as long as I can remember. Few things change but those changes are constant and consistant. Each year there are a couple fewer old faces and a couple new baby faces peaking out from blankets and strollers. We renew each year.

One of the interesting changes, at least to me and perhaps an anthropologist, is the food each year. My earliest memories of the family reunion were of sampling all of the different types of home cooked fried chicken, fried pork chops, stew beef, and enough greens, beens, and biscuits to make good and sure everyone was fed before they hit the table of stired cakes, pies, and coblers. Everything everywhere was homecooked, and more often than not the ingredients all came from their own farms.

Through the years times change, the elders die off and the young ones have left the agrarian lifestyle to work in factories, offices, and the like. Fields of old are becomming hunting grounds and neighborhoods. Over the years this has led to a very gradual change in the yearly spread. I remember the first time my mother brought a casserole to the event. I had some, mom had some and the rest went home with us. Over several years of her bringing the same dish year after year my generation first tried and than came to enjoy it. As they reached breeding age and started to bring dishes of their own we saw a movement towards casseroles, and ingredients bought from the grocery store. When their children had children (I am still shocked by this by the way), the food on the table was of great variety and the older generation is a little better about trying new things.

This year there was only one bowl of fried chicken and it was KFC. There was only one plate of fried pork chops and they were heavenly. There were two lasagnas, a dish unheard of just five years ago. For the first time a the dessert table were at least two store bought dishes served in their origional boxes. I brought a fruit works from Pie Works. (I always felt it was my duty to bring exotic dishes from the far flung regions to the table) Someone else bought a big tray of baklava. Half the fun was listening to people old and young look at it and wondering how one was supposed to eat it. At the end of the day the fruit works and the baklava were nothing more than empty boxes.

I think the most shocking change was me. I had a biscuit on the road down there and by the traditional serving time of 1pm I was so hungry I was shaking. Two plates of food later I thought I would require medical attention. I remember vaguely the year that I didn't go for thirds. This was the first year that I thought I would require a vomitorium after only two plates. I walked outside unsteadily the wind was blowing. The wind made me want to hurl. I returned inside and sat very quietly in a chair hoping I could resist the forces bent on my explosion.

After about an hour I thought it might be possible I could get into the car without serious incident. A half hour later I had to pull over at a rest area for a nap. After a half hour passed out, I thought I could drive home safely.

I didn't have dinner.

I slept fitfully as I was unable to get comfortable, they say when you eat too much and go to bed you have night mares. I don't know about that but when the asian guy in the Scooby gang announced that they had never handled a murder case before I was glad when Sara kicked me and ordered me to roll over. It took about five minutes to roll over. I think gravitational forces were at work. If not that, surely tidal forces were to blame. I only know that by the time I revolved I was ordered to revolve again. The animals got restless every time my day side faced the ceiling.

Morning was hard. The dreams, the discomfort, the spin. When we reached campus I began my trek from the parking lot to the office. It took a half hour, a base camp and sherpas. I really needed a bigger sherpa. Now here I sit in my desk, feeling like I just ate a desk. I am eyeing suspiciously my can of instant breakfast. I am supposed to use it to wash down my vitamine breakfast. Ain't gonna happen. I can't see my knees....If I die today please have the wake somewhere my body isn't, the smell of food right now would be too much to bare, even post mortum.

Just rememember to dump a bucket of chicken on my grave on my birthday each year, for the brother that didn't make it.

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Here's a list of words and phrases that should be banished from our vocabularly. While this list is good, I think we could all add a few things to this list.

I for one would like to see an end to the phrase "Fair and Impartial" which as best as I can tell means "My opinion is better than your opinion.".

Another one for the axe ought to be "Read My Lips". This is the verbal version of a slight of hand technique, "Look over here while I do something sneaky while you are distracted."

"Ask your doctor about..." This is in the language of corproate drug czars "You've got cooties! You need to buy our stuff, but unfortunatly your doctor has to perscribe it...damned doctors....Make them write you a perscription now or you will die...and your little dog too."

"Easy View", while this is a very clever way of saying "Rerun" it just seems slimy. Like Pre-owned, or "Gifted and Talented" You never really know what you are getting. I remember when it was suggested I start attending "Gifted and Talented" classes. My mother had to ask if it meant I was up for a college scholarship or a helmet and mittens.

There are a whole bunch of terms worth banning that are specific to the State System those of you who work for the state will recognize them. Things like:

"Transparent Change" This is IT for "It worked ok for me".

"Functional Title" This phrase means, "you are going to do high level work for low level pay."

"Reorganization" translates into, "We have no idea what's going on, so we hired a contractor for a hundred thousand dollars a month who is going to tell us what they think."

"Functional Manager" this means, "That guy who makes less money than you is now your boss, just not on paper."

"Candidate search process" is state political speak for "We already know who we are going to hire but we have to pretend we don't and interview a bunch of people to satisify state law" In the colloquial South this is also know as a "Possium Hunt". <--spelled with a P and not an O.

"Recommendation" means "Something we ask for so you think we actually care what you think."

On second thought, I probably shouldn't bring up bannable state phrases, this blog could take days to write and in the end communications in the state system would become nothing more than a series of meaningless hand gestures. All that silence would get on my nerves.

Posted by Woody Cavenaugh at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This blog entry starts with a familiar disclaimer: I love my wife. It should be obvious on account of the fact that I put up with all of the "quirks" that make her the wonderful woman she is, but for some reason, that doesn't translate into "Woman Speak"* so I have to state it out in a short sentence. Here it is again, just in case, "I love my wife."

I love my wife, but what is it about the holidays that makes something simple like a Christmas gift so difficult. The whole year long she makes mention of things that she thinks she would like. When the holidays come around I casually bring it up in conversation to see if there is still interest. As best as I can tell during the entire winter season she has no interest or opinion on anything up to and including if she finds the meal she is currently eating tasty. Tis the season of, "I don't know and I don't care, fa la la la la its up to you".

While this wall of non-commital reaches to the stars in every direction she throws out these little statements like, "Your present(s) just shipped!" Eventually I have no choice but to drop all pretense and say, "I'm in the process of getting you something for Christmas, I have asked you about a whole bunch of stuff and you have been completely uninterested in any of it."

You're probably thinking at this point that she is going to come back with something like, "Anything you get me will be wonderful." or even the ubiquitious "Surprise me.". Nope. I should be so lucky. What I get instead of "Surprise me" is "Hey, the bank account is getting pretty low, you'd better not get me anything. I don't want a check to bounce or anything."

I love my wife. If I didn't I'd be single, or at the very least a widower. I am ownz3d. I have two choices, obey and get her nothing while I am burried under a pile of the most wonderful swag, or disobey get her what I darned well please and pray we don't lose the house.

Since when have I ever obeyed? I'm going shopping soon and I'm getting what ever the heck I want to give her and if she doesn't like it... Well...if she doesn't like it I guess I'll keep it for myself. After all, if I let her return it she has learned nothing. That's right. I'm making the holidays educational. It will learn.

Or I will be killed in my sleep. Either way, I'll be sleeping in (or on) dirt for the new year.

* Woman speak is kind of like the language the adults speak in Charlie Brown, only unlike the Peanuts gang, I don't have a full grasp of the language. I just get clips and phrases.

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Friday after work, I met some co-workers and friends at Natty Greenes for a beer, a sandwhich, and a fond adieu to one of the best things that ever happened to my workplace. (Which explains why he isn't here anymore.) Good is rewarded, bad is tolerated, really bad is rewarded, really good is actively punished. These are politicians I work for not rocket scientist obviously. That however is a complaint about work, and I don't complain about work here, that's why god invented Karoke bars, and happy hour.

At any rate, Friday much to my surprise parts of downtown Greensboro were shut down for a holiday street festival complete with antler hats and live music. My walk to the YWCA from Natty Greenes was very festive, my only regret was that I couldn't stand around and listen more.

Then I had another terrific night of fencing! Nothing cures a bad day like an evening of fencing. Afterwards I found myself catching back up with the remainer of the first group at the Flat Iron, I had a beer and chatted with people I like. It was very pleasant. Someone suggested we leave the Flat Iron and go catch a blues band playing at the Blind Tiger, so off Sara and Woody go.

No one of our group ever joined us but we got to see Cyril Lance, and that was quite a treat. It was Sara, myself, a group of frat boys participating in homo-erotic behavior, the band, and the audience there specifically to see the band. The most interesting part of all of this was the fact that the audience was older than the members of the band. I always believed that you probably had have some years on you to have the life experiences enough to really sing and play the blues. These 30somethings proved that either they had some pretty tramatic childhoods through college, or the blues is nothing more than a state of mind.

Third bar, third beer, one night. Doesn't that count as bar hopping? I always thought that bar hopping was something one did while in college that I had managed to miss out on entirely. Maybe, but I am willing to let myself off on a technicality. Since I never graduated in the nine years I was a full time student, and I'm still on a college campus five days a week I must still count. This is excellent news! Now I can go back and do all of the things that I saw in Animal House.

Ok, I'm going to need an extention ladder, a shopping cart...this is going to be GREAT!

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