Author Archives: Michael C. McGreevy

Meetings suck

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Forget fire and brimstone. Convince me that Hell looks like this and I'll be at church every week. Photo courtesy of the International Monetary Fund via Flickr.

As much as I may not like to admit it, I work in Corporate America. My company is a not-for-profit credit union, but regardless of that there are certain aspects of the organization that are no different than any other small to mid-sized corporation. We have a “culture,” we have a dress code, we have rules about what exits you can use to leave the building and what kind of decorations you can have in your cubicle. We make five-year plans and talk about improving efficiency. We have department rivalries, rumor mills, and the occasional scandal. Like I said, in a lot of ways we’re pretty much your average every day organization. The big difference, of course, is that we’re not bending our members over for billions of dollars in profits that are being paid out to shareholders or overpaid executives.

So we have that going for us anyway.

We also have meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.

I hate meetings.

A lot.

I do not, however, hate alot of meetings. The presence of an alot at a meeting would make it infinitely more interesting.

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Equivalencies

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Photo courtesy of Archigeek via Flickr

I recently celebrated my 10th anniversary with Weight Watchers.

Honestly, I can’t say that I really “celebrated” it. Hell, I didn’t even go to my meeting that week (not from a lack of desire to do so, but we have been down to the final few weeks of a show that I’m in and I haven’t had the time). One would also think that, after ten years, I would have hit Lifetime status and that my relationship with Weight Watchers would be restricted to maintaining my goal weight.

That, unfortunately, is not the case.

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Full Circle

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Sometime around October of 2001 I got a phone call from my friend “ranney.” He was directing a musical with a young theater company in Tampa and he was having a hard time casting one of the characters. He had directed me in a musical adaptation of The Birds that he wrote while I was a student at the Polk Community College and he felt I was a good match for the part. I came in and auditioned for him, and a few days later I got the call offering me the role.

The show was Maxwell: A New Rock Musical By Joe Popp, and it was the first paid acting gig I ever got. It was also the beginning of my year relationship with The Jobsite Theater. I was very much an unknown factor in this production, and I had the extra baggage of being recently divorced with the need to occasionally bring my five year old son with me to rehearsal. “ranney” put his full support behind me, though, and he managed to convince the Powers That Be to give me a shot.

Ten years later and I’m still working with them.

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Starting Over

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It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

ShrinkGeek came into existence as a company just over two years ago. At the time I truly believed that by combining what was a great name and the talents of a small handful of my closest friends I’d be able to create a web site that was the go-to place for geeks to get their health and fitness information.

In some ways we were very successful. We managed to get a decent page rank out of Google. Rafe and I were hired to do a series of diet and fitness related articles for WoWInsider. We had several advertisers offer to pay us in exchange for links (and we even had the integrity to turn a few of them down because we didn’t think they fit with our image). We were given several products to review, and we got some decent interviews. Ultimately, I think we were able to produce some extremely stellar content.

Unfortunately we haven’t made any significant money in the process of doing so. In fact, when you factor in the costs associated with running the site as an actual business, we’ve operated at a loss the entire time. You know that old saying about how time equals money? Well, it takes a lot of time to produce quality content for a web site and when that time isn’t being rewarded by any money it gets harder to build up the motivation to actually devote the time necessary to do it.

Long story short? We burnt out.

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Facts are pesky things

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I was going to write this in a tweet but there’s a little bit more detail than I could fit into 140 characters.

As I’m sure most of you have heard by now there is a new version of the Mark Twain novel Huckleberry Finn that has removed all references to the word “nigger” and replaced it with the word “slave.” They have also removed the word “Injun,” but I am unsure as to what they have replaced it with (I’m guessing “Indian”).

There’s a lot of folks who are up in arms over this and who want to raise the specter of Political Correctness or blame this on the Obama Administration.

Here’s some fact juice for you, sparky –

Huckleberry Finn is in the public domain. What this means, if you aren’t familiar with the term, is that it was written so long ago that the copyright has expired. This is why you can download all of Mark Twain’s work for free if you have an e-Reader. This also means that, because of the lack of copyright, anyone can publish the book and edit it to their heart’s content.

Which is exactly what one publishing company has decided to do.

If you want to read Huckleberry Finn with all the original language intact you will still be able to find a copy. The firemen have not come to take away your precious words, and Big Brother isn’t stepping in here to protect you from reading something that might be offensive.

NewSouth books thinks that there is a market in this edition, and they are putting their money into that belief. It may very well pay off for them. So, if anything, this incident is an example of our free market in action and nothing more.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go back to collecting tin foil for my new hat.

The Searchers

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Jeffrey Hunter (Martin Pawley), John Wayne (Ethan Edwards)

Last night I sat down with Krystalle and Jareth to watch the 1956 John Wayne movie The Searchers.

The reason we picked this particular movie is because it appears on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. While we were waiting in line to get on the Great Movie Ride at Hollywood Studios last week we decided that there were a lot of “classic” films that we haven’t seen and that one of our goals in 2011 should be to rectify that situation. The Searchers was the first movie we picked off of the list, largely due to the fact that it is only going to be available through Netflix for a few more days.

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Accomplishment

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What did you DO today?

I want to ask that question so often.

Of myself.

Of those around me.

I know what you “did”.

I read all about it on Facebook.

But I want to know what you DID.

What did you accomplish?

What positive things did you do?

What did you CREATE?

How did you leave a mark?

I fear that, in many cases, the answer is “not much.”

More often than not, in fact, the answer is “nothing.”

The sad thing is that we are at a point in history when creativity should be at a peak.

Instead we spend most of our time simply commenting on what others have created.

Or, even worse, expecting people to find us interesting just because we’re prolific in social media.

You talk all day long.

Do you actually SAY anything, or do you just expect us to bask in the awesomeness that is you?

These are the questions I ask myself.

These are the questions that I want to scream in all caps from the top of the Twitter-sphere.

There is so much potential out there today.

So many opportunities for us to create wonderful, beautiful things.

And we’re wasting them.

In 140 characters or less.

A Puppy For Christmas

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One year I asked my Mom to get me a dog for Christmas.

I don’t remember how old I was at the time, but I must have been fairly young. Young enough that the memory of that particular Christmas is the only crisp one I have of that particular time in my life. You know how there are certain memories you have that are so bright and vivid that the minute you think of them you feel like you are there in the moment all over again?

Yeah, this is one of them.

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Winding Down

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2010 is drawing to an end, and in only a few days we’ll be hosting our last (and biggest) party of the year with our annual Nightmare Before Christmas party. As I sort through the various Christmas Cards (none of which will be reciprocated this year – sorry folks), I stumble across the occasional Holiday Letter. This is kind of a tradition on the Andres side of my family. I have quite a few of the ones that my Grandmother sent out, and every year my Mother and Uncles do their own versions that they include with their Christmas Cards. I even did a few myself, but with my immersion into the world of blogging it seemed like most of the people who I would send out that letter to would already know what was going on. When you consider the fact that I kind of suck at getting out cards to begin with, putting the additional pressure of writing a letter to include with them on myself seemed kinda pointless.

So it goes.

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Gratitude

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Yesterday I took the whole family to the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Florida. This was my second weekend in a row at the resort, as Krystalle and I had gone the previous week. My big gift for the whole family this year was the purchase of Florida Resident Annual Passes.

It’s already been worth it.

Due to the fact that I had to buy a new car over the weekend (something I’ll write about later today in a much more detailed “state of the Mike” post) money is likely going to be tight and future trips are going to have to be much more in the “bring it from home” category. Yesterday, however, I tried to be a bit on the relaxed side and we did all of our eating in the parks.

While there are many things I could talk about during the course of the day, one really stood out as being a shining example of how awesome my son is.

While we were walking towards the Pirates of the Caribbean ride he kind of pulled me aside and asked me how much money I had planned to spend today. It was kind of an odd question, and I told him so. “I’m sorry,” he replied. “It’s just that I know things are kind of tight and that you spent a lot of money on the tickets and I don’t want to stress you out by asking for things that you can’t afford.”

I damn near started crying right then and there. Not out of any sense of shame or sadness, but out of sheer appreciation for the fact that he was considerate enough of the household finances and their impact on my stress levels to take a moment and make sure that our family vacation wasn’t going to make matters worse. Maintaining a household is one of those things that you don’t often get recognized for – especially from the kids. This is not a dig on them at all. It is simply the way of the world. I had no appreciation for how hard my Mom worked to maintain the status quo around our place until I grew up and had to do it myself.

It’s nice though, every once in a while, to realize that they recognize what you put yourself through to make sure they have what they need and want.

Also? As much as it feels like hubris to me to say it I have to admit that when I see him do things like that I am filled with an enormous sense of pride over the job I’ve done with him as his Father. I look at things like that and I pat myself on the back for a job well done.

So, yeah…I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.