​I’m a cheapskate. We probably all have that somewhere in our personal gene pools – a little thing where we’re unwilling to spend money.
 
It might be something stupid like driving across town to save three cents a gallon on gasoline, while you’re wasting all that gas by driving there. Or something stupid like joining a buying club for $177 annually where you only use about $81 of their services each year. Those are the types of blind spots many of us live with. We turn off our logical and practical side to go with emotion or stubbornness instead: “I’m not spending three bucks on THAT!”
 
I broke my reading glasses over a month ago. Did I replace them? Of course not. They still worked despite the fact that the left stem snapped off and couldn’t be taped back.

So, I read with the left stem missing. This means bending the glasses as I put them on so they don’t stay cockeyed on my nose, making me read the newspaper, my phone or anything else at our kitchen table by tilting my head the opposite way.

There’s nothing wrong with this. I don’t care if I look weird or cheap. Who’s going to see me? If my wife or kids mock me, I can live with that. They’ve mocked me before and will mock me again, I’m quite confident of that.
 
It’s a slight inconvenience, sure. But I can easily afford a new pair of reading glasses at Walmart or any one of twenty other stores that sell them at retail for a throwaway price. I don’t care about style (obviously, since I already look dorky with the stem missing).

Which makes it slightly ironic and strange that I don’t go out and buy a new pair. Itseems like a waste of time and money because the current pair still functions.

Until recently, that is. This past week, bending them to fit on my nose hasn’t quite let them settle comfortably they way they had been. Instead, even after giving them a good twist, they stay slightly askew and make reading more of a task.
 
This led to one of those short conversations with my wife, which seem to happen with more regularity during the progression of marriage, describing the rationale on giving up some small behavior. I typically couch it like this:
 
“You won’t believe this.” (Attempting to get her full attention.) “After using those broken reading glasses for the past six weeks, I’m giving in.” (She smiles amusingly, knowing what’s coming next.)
 

“I’m going to buy a new pair. These broken ones have gotten inconvenient and useless.”
 
She doesn’t laugh or hound me, knowing it takes me time to admit my mule-headedness about something that makes absolutely no sense to begin with. But, I reckon we all go there sometimes.
 
It’s on my list to head off a “reading glasses purchase” journey. It won’t cost much and it won’t take long, so who knows why I avoided it. Yet I did for almost two months. Some things in life remain a mystery.

​Until recently, I was unaware of Ali Wong. I saw a review for her book, “Dear Girls,” a few months before Christmas and put it on my list of gifts for someone in my family to get for me.

The review intrigued me. She’s a comedian, and the review was positive, discussing the humor and insights on topics like the embarrassments of dating, the challenges of working on the road day after day and the difficulties in raising kids as a working mom.
 
She writes, “Dear Girls: You are prohibited from reading this book until you are 21-years-old. I write about some truly embarrassing sh…t I did in my youth, and I don’t want you to use these stories against me when you are teenagers. Thanks for understanding – now put this this damn book back on the shelf.”
 
How can you not read a book after that? I had to check it out.
 
She put it together as a series of humorous essays to her two daughters. She includes advice, tells multiple stories on the silly things she’s done throughout the years and then goes onto give fun-injected tips to avoid her mistakes. Told in an easy-to-read format, she keeps you chuckling, thinking and wondering why the heck you haven’t gone to see her on stage.
 
Buried inside though is more than humor. She takes shots at a number of topics, including stereotypes in general, and does a great job at forcing you to understand others and how easy it is to put people into categories rather than see those we meet as individuals first.
 
Two issues stood out to me. In her profession, she is often interviewed by journalists. Far too often, as she describes it, the questions become, “What’s it like to be an Asian American comedian?” She’s not asked, “What’s it like to be a comedian?”
 
While she recognizes the rationale for the question, she wants to be seen as a “comedian,” standing on stage and being funny because she makes people laugh and is talented and people want to watch her. Sure, she uses her Asian heritage in her schtick, she freely admits that. But when the first questions regard her ethnic background, she feels she’s being categorized rather than appreciated.

Similarly, she mentions frequently being approached by writers with questions about what it’s like to be a female comedian. Similar to the questions about her Asian American background, when she is asked this question, she feels the journalist is immediately placing her into a “female” box rather than a “comedian” box. And, again, she uses her sex in many of her skits to get laughs. But the humor is universal, whether you are male, female, or Norwegian.

I think that’s her point. She has to be funny. She has to be funny to a wide audience or she won’t be successful. Yes, she utilizes Asian and female perspectives to get the laughs, but if that doesn’t stand out to everyone in the audience, she fails. So, she is just another comedian on stage, utilizing material from her life to crack people up.
 
Her perspective is something, I believe, we all can grow from. Take people as individuals when you meet them. Appreciate them (or not) based on who they are, not your preconceived notions. We’d all make more friends that way. And journalists would get more respect from their interviewees if they approached stars that way.

The lyrics to “Stop Making Sense,” a song by the Talking Heads decades ago, make sense. Because it’s about how what we “do” isn’t always what we set out to do, or meant to do, or told others what we were going to do.
 
Our landscape, political, personal and professional, is littered with examples of people not following through or doing what they said they were going to do. It can be as simple as, “See you in front of the Target tomorrow morning at 9.” And then the person doesn’t show or shows up at 9:22.
 
Say one thing. Do another.
 
I’m fascinated by the things people say there are going to do, and then don’t. This filters into goals, expectations, and how we tend to live in our heads rather than reality. I believe most people when they say something like, “I’m going to start working out for an hour a day five days a week” come January 1, that they honestly believe they are going to follow through. It’s with full delusional belief that they make these types of internal deliberations.

But for any of you out there who work out regularly, when the new year’s comes around and you look at the workout room the first of February, how many of those well-meaning and well-intentioned individuals are still running on the treadmill, accelerating on the stationary bike or lifting some weights? Not very many.
 
It seems to me we all have our needs to divorce from reality. In fact, I believe we survive by allowing our brain to have these fantasies or dreams without holding ourselves accountable. To a certain extent, it allow our subconscious latitude to go wherever it wants, following the pleasure principle so that positive feelings result.
 
We choose to avoid bad things, driving them to the back of our brain. It would be interesting for people when they have those types of thoughts to verbalize them to someone else and see their reaction.
 
“Hey, Walt, I’m thinking about trying out for the senior pro golf tour next year?
 
“Are you serious? You shoot 94 and those guys consistently shoot in the 60’s. You’d have to take over 25 shots off your game.”
 
“Oh, I’ve had some good rounds. I just need to tune a few things up and concentrate on it.”
 
Not gonna happen. Though, of course, an extreme example, the golf point details how we head down the unrealistic paths.

Another issue is not fully communicating what we mean. We don’t really mean we think we can make the senior tour. We just mean we want to improve our game, so we say something outlandish. That is another classic miscommunication though as people take you at your word rather than realizing you just want to be a better golfer next year.

Why not just say that? Certainly, may of us do and our friends and loved ones know close to what we mean when we say something or make a claim.

But there sure seems to be a lot “not making sense” these days. Maybe we need to go back and listen to the Talking Heads. Make sense to others. Sounds like a goal.

​I never expected this. Scrolling through television shows over half-a-year ago, I stumbled across the show, “Dr. Pimple Popper.” Sounded pretty gross. The clips they showed were also graphic and slimy, making me think, “Who the heck would ever watch that show?”

Morbid curiosity got to me. For some reason, I had to check it out and see if this was about popping massive pimples. Which, it turned out not to be. It was (and is) a whole lot more, and something that is actually entertaining, interesting, and dare I say it?: Uplifting.
 
How a show billed as being about popping pimples can be uplifting to the viewer deserves some explanation. It certainly took a few viewings for me before I began to notice a deeper trend of helping people overcome obstacles in their lives. Doctor Lee, who stars in the show, makes this happen.

With a blend of positive change, diagnosis and action, humor and investigative analysis, Dr. Lee brings the issues of the patients to the fore. They range from removing simple (but sometimes HUGE) cysts, to skin lesions of unknown origin/name which the patients’ previous doctors have been unable to effectively treat.
 
For example, a recent episode brought a woman to the viewers who had a head crown and multiple large cysts on her scalp. She was embarrassed to go outside and run chores, and her daughter was being harassed by kids at school because of the way the mom looked. It was sad and disheartening, but there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed.
 
Dr. Lee, with compassion and insight, incised the bumps, cleaned up the woman’s scalp and hair, and delivered the woman’s life back to her. Lee gave her peace and grace.
 
A second recent case brought to Lee an elderly ex-military man from Wisconsin with a milky white skin scaling covering his legs, arms and face. His toenails were so thick with whatever the syndrome was had turned the toenails white with close to half-an-inch thick crusting.  The man had given up on life. His middle-aged son cried for the loss of the father he’d known in his younger days.
 
It didn’t take much for Dr. Lee to find answers. They weren’t complex. She didn’t promise a full recovery. She pledged there would be progress, and his syndrome would improve.
 
Applying simple moistened compresses and showing the son how to take care of the treatment himself, she sent them on their way to continue the applications while she delivered samples of the skin in for analysis.
 
There was nothing that miraculously came back from the lab. But, there was an element of a miracle when the man and his son returned after continuous treatment of his skin. With the father’s arms cleared up, the son said how he could see red in his dad’s skin on his legs for the first time in years. The improvements got the father out of his funk and clearly reduced the depression the son held in his soul.
 
There are both little and big things we help others with in life. Dr. Pimple Popper may sound like a goofy show with not much to it. You’d be missing the point though if you felt that way by reading the TV guide.
 
It’s so much more. Redemption. Not giving up. Changing how you see life. Give it a pop. See what you think.