Rules

Today's post will be predictably disjointed, as I'm watching Monday Night Football and occasionally flipping to ABC to see if Hope Solo is on Dancing With the Stars yet. I've watched about thirty seconds of the latter so far, which is about twenty-nine seconds more than I had ever watched before.

Let's talk about rules. I like rules. They tell you where you stand, or at least where you're supposed to stand. There are sorts of rules. There are laws, which are society's written rules. There are customs, which are society's unwritten rules. There is religion, which sets down human behavior in relation to each other and the divine. When I started paying attention to football, it wasn't because I was rooting so hard for one team or another. It was so I could try and diagnose what kind of play was being called and what the penalties were. Why was this allowed and that was not? It was only later when I realized "Hey, there are teams from Louisiana that play this game" that I found a real rooting interest.

There's an important element to learning the rules that sometimes goes unnoticed. If you don't know the rules, then how can you enjoy breaking them? There's no thrill or sense of danger if you don't have that fear of getting caught doing something wrong. I sometimes think about this exchange from the The Golden Child:

Old Man: Remember to stay on the path!
Jarrell: I heard you the first time! The path better stay under me!
...
Jarrell: I thought you said to stay on the path!
Old Man: Yes, but you must know when to break the rules!

(NOTE: I do not advocate breaking the rules often, mostly because I find it just as satisfying to find a way to make them not apply to me)

(NOTE #2: The Golden Child is 25 years old)

When I was younger -- probably around the time of Scotty Version 2.0 or so -- I actually wrote out a list of rules for how I would live. I've forgotten almost all of them, but I think the list was probably around 70 items or so. I vaguely remember throwing it out when I was in high school or college, and I'd probably die of embarrassment if you showed it to me today.

Sometime while I was living in Falls Church, VA I started to come up with a much shorter and less pretentious series of rules. It now reads something like this:

1) Don't be stupid (I think about this one a lot)
2) When you've got the money, take the money
3) If you have the chance of driving or being driven, be driven
4) Never pass up a chance to go to the bathroom
5) The ruling of the waitress is absolute [provided that a) the waitress is a good waitress and b) I'm the one who decides if the waitress is good or not]

Lately I've been thinking about creating a completely different set of rules for dealing with drunk girls. I had a very nice conversation with a girl I drove home one night, and two nights later I saw her in public and she said, "Thanks for giving me a ride home the other night. I can't remember a single thing we talked about."

Ouch.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at a bar when a girl walked in with her date. He went to the men's room, and she walked up to the bar and stood between me and another guy. Then she asked me if I wanted to get out on the dance floor with her. Now, I don't really care about any sort of 'man code' or whatever they call the nonsense frat boys come up with to govern relations among themselves, but I'm not dancing with a girl who's just tried to ditch her date (who presumably paid for dinner elsewhere before driving her here, and is presumably paying for drinks) when he goes to the bathroom. I'd be upset (more like incensed) if a girl pulled that on me. When I pointed out that she was already there with someone, she said he was "just some guy my cousin set me up with."

It's kind of a shame, because she looked like a lot of fun. If she'd left with the guy and come back by herself, I may have taken her up on her offer. Alas, she acted like she was even more trouble than she was fun.

If I were to come up with rules for dealing with drunk girls, they'd probably go something like:

"Listen to everything she says about other people and nothing she says about you"
"Don't dance with a girl who looks like she's trying to dump her date"

Doing those two things might save me a lot of grief.

CTP Metoyer Cleaning

Here is a video of me discussing the cleaning project for the Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer grave in the American Cemetery in Natchitoches, LA. To read a writeup of the project, visit my business website here.



At times I look like a disembodied head floating above a blue blob. Whatever you do, please don't make me listen to the sound of my own voice.