​Unpacking boxes from our move to Wisconsin the past two weeks caused many memories to emerge. You forget about what your kids have said, done, drawn or written over the years. If you’re a reasonable pack rat, you’ll find multiple amusing artifacts.
 
There’s that third grade picture book with “spegeti” for “spaghetti” and “carit” for “carrot.” You find stick figure drawings of yourself through the eyes of a kindergartner, with your legs taking up 90 percent of the picture and your head ten percent, with no upper torso. Maybe they know something more about our brain capacity at an early age than we demonstrate as adults. Go figure.
 
You flip through photographs, finding vacations and special moments you’d entirely forgotten. The memories return.
 
As papers were pulled out of boxes, I found a number of phrases that made me smile. One in particular stood out.
 
Our younger daughter Skyler, who at the time must have been 8- or 9-years-old, said, “I meat loafed it.” I have this written down on a three-by-five card. At this stage of my life and memory, I have no idea what she meant. It’s still dang funny to read that and think about her saying it. But I wonder what the subtext was.
 
Was she being literal? Doubtful.
 
Was she discussing something to do with the singer “Meat Loaf?” Highly unlikely. She wouldn’t have known who he was at that stage of her life.
 
More than likely she was applying the phrase to something she did. We introduced her to golf fairly early in life, so maybe she was talking about a bad shot she hit and said, “I meat loafed that one,” when she was discussing a chunk of turf she’d ejected down the fairway. It’s possible.
 
It could also have been that she mispronounced something and meant to say “heat load” or “feet moat.” Who knows?
 
What I do know is that odd sounding phrases sure are funny to read, especially if you add food to it. Think about it.
 
What if you spaghetti-ed that painting? What would that mean? Probably that you plastered paint all over the place with lots of fine lines and red coloring. “Man, Leonardo da Vinci really knew how to spaghetti the canvas. He was a master.”
 
Our mother loved the line, “You turkey.” It was nothing new then, and still proves useful today. It applies to someone who is a loser when you don’t want to be mean about it.
 
Just the other day, I hamburgered an assignment. I packed a bunch of juicy words inside of an opening and closing that sounded similar and added a lot of flavorful language throughout the body. “I hamburgered that writing assignment.” It sure looked good and whoever read it afterwards felt full and content.
 
Sometimes you need to grease the skids to get something down quickly. What if you “olive oiled” it instead. “Zach, quit taking so much time, lay down some olive oil.”
 
Restaurants know how to play with this type of language. It catches your eye, makes you want to try something new, causes laughter. For example, one of my all-time favorite names for a restaurant is the Chinese chain, “Wok ‘N Roll.” Genius.  How can you NOT go and eat in that place at least once to see if the food matches the talent of the play on words?
 
We limit ourselves far too much when it comes to how we use words, whether it’s about food or something else. So next time you mess something up, tell everyone you “meat loafed it.” We’ll leave up to you to explain what you meant.

There’s been a shift in our personal and collective noise standards over the years. When we leave our regular routine, aural stimulation stands out. You notice new sounds. You pay attention to noises that you might not normally hear. 
 
I recently played golf near Chicago’s Midway Airport. For the most part, it was a quiet round of golf. The side street nearby was not wall traveled, and most of the holes did not border any heavily trafficked roads. 
 
This gave our group a sense of silence, a nice bonus any time you swing the clubs. But as the quiet engulfs you, your senses focus more intensely on what’s out there. On the seventh hole, marveling at the peace, my hearing dialed into a low hum in the background. 
 
I turned to one of my partners in the foursome and said, “How close are we to Midway?” Oh, it’s right over there,” he pointed, meaning probably a mile or so away. 
 
The planes were not landing or taking off over us, so we didn’t notice the whine of their engines. But when the quiet of the course settled in, our aural stimulation factor intensified and the light rumble in the distance became noticeable. 
 
This happens all the time in our lives these days – getting hammered by noise we don’t want or like. Smart phones go off in restaurants, car alarms blast, your neighbor’s lawn mower chugs along. They all infringe on our days, and we really don’t think about it.  
 
Then there are the sounds we do like: Our phones going off and the display shows the name and number of a long-term friend; listening to a friend play an original song on the piano; waves crashing in the distance. 
 
A year or so ago, I visited with a great friend in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He loves to tinker on the piano. I sat out back near a stream, isolating myself, reading a book, when very slightly I heard some tunes that brought back memories from our college days. He revved it up, getting into the rhythm, moving from quickly from one riff to another. His music brought me back to the house. 
 
I stood outside, listening, contemplating, tuning in to the joy and expression coming from the notes, letting it wash over me. So different from many other sounds that bombard us daily that we tend to ignore. 
 
There are fewer sounds like my buddy’s piano these days, it seems to me. Those are the sounds we invite in. We want them. 
 
Too many sounds are uninvited, pushed on us. So we ignore or mask them somehow. 
 
Sometimes I wonder if that’s why iPods have becomes so popular: People want to focus solely on their own music, and block out the outside world. Wearing headphones is a good way to give you sounds you want AND eliminate the unwanted noise. It’s about control. 
 
We recently moved outside Milwaukee to a new house where you can hear turkeys in the woods, kids playing in the house next door, chickens clucking. Because it’s so quiet, each of those stand out. Those are good sounds. We like them. They make you smile and think of nature and your own childhood and how much fun it was to play outside and run around in woods. 
 
That’s the type of aural stimulation we need more of every day – the stuff that builds enjoyable memories and gives you positive feelings. We don’t need an iPod to create that. We only need to find the silence and listen for the vibe. ​

​It’s striking how many people seem really angry in the United States. I think they watch too much TV.
 
When you see a story repeated over and over for which there is a very difficult solution that will take at least three years to implement, most people don’t want to hear the details and work on getting it done. Instead they get angry.

They listen to the talking head prognosticate and predict, point fingers and assess blame. Venomous viewers do the same. “What the heck is wrong with that guy? When is he going to do something? He’s stealing our taxpayer dollars? She lied! He’s a thief.” And on and on.
 
There is a HUGE problem when it comes to the number of people watching news on television, listening to repetitive blather. When nothing is going on, the clips get repeated. Changing the station, you see similar video partnered with a different face.


Once news is reported, what is left? Opinions, looking back, and seeing what the future holds. Hence, if you know what’s going on in your neighborhood, city, state or country, you have all the news you need, but because the television must keep you on their station, they hurl insults, pick everything apart and pretend they are the experts. Then, as the viewer buys in, he or she starts to think she is just as informed, and should also complain and assess blame.

And here we are today, America. Yelling, screaming, coming home from work angry, slapping the dinner table, because we think something can be simply changed, when most often that is not the case.

Change is hard and takes time, whether it’s at the personal level (lose some weight), marital (resolve a difference when both parties feel they have the perfect position) or at work (make a decision that everyone supports and acts on, without attacking the leader). We don’t respect the experts hard at work in industry and government solving long-term systemic problems.
 
Having recently moved to Wisconsin from Texas, I’ve spent the past five weeks with the TV almost entirely off. I feel much more relaxed. There are several reasons for this, but one is that I’m not watching television news. Quite frankly, I don’t care. I have a job to do. I work out first thing in the morning, go to work, handle everything I can for the day, come home, read a book and go to bed.
 
I pay attention to my surroundings, focusing on building personal relationships and getting to better know the area. I listen, pay attention, ask questions, drive to customers, look at things first-hand. You learn face-to-face that way about many things. You’re not getting recycled information.
 
And I’m not listening to “news” people dissecting what someone in the public arena said or did yesterday. There is no “presuming” what someone did, or arguing about what was right or wrong, or whose opinion matters more.
 
Last week, I spoke about this with a coworker. He mentioned how he’d gotten his grandmother to stop watching the TV news. Suddenly she wasn’t so angry any more. She had time for more things. She didn’t worry as much. She relaxed.

It’s a pretty simple equation. When you listen to screaming heads over and over, you start to assimilate screaming into your repertoire. When you hear angry voices a lot, you start to get angry, too.

So eliminate the source. You’ll feel better. You’ll reconnect with what’s important, like living your life to its fullest, reading some quality books, enjoying truly engaged and significant conversation. Lower those frustrations.

​Fruit purchased with the best of intentions affects us all. We see those peaches at the roadside farmer’s stand in mid-July and we salivate.  “Man, those look good.”
 
We fill a paper sack with six, maybe a dozen, and bring them home, thinking they’ll be good for a snack at work, and to slap into a peach pie later in the week. Instead, inertia gets in the way.
 
Monday, you wake up late and pass on breakfast, while forgetting to put anything into your lunch bucket to bring to work. You go out for a soup and half a sandwich, feeling righteous. You end up behind on your project, get home late, stuff your face with some cold pizza and land in the sack with your face down, saliva dripping out the side of your mouth as you pass out at 8:30 p.m.
 
Tuesday you jump out of bed refreshed, decide to go for a run that takes longer than you expected so you race through your shower and out the door, grabbing a banana, but missing the peaches, which you’ve conveniently stored in a slightly less accessible spot on your kitchen counter that doesn’t register with your morning brain cells. At lunch you’re ravenous, and pound a huge sub at Jersey Mike’s, with all the toppings, chips and a large soft drink. Yum. Burp.
 
You skip dinner, still full from all those mid-day carbos. Nightmares invade your dreams.

Wednesday is weird from start to finish. You feel off all day, eating lightly, chewing slowly, taking small bites, leaving things on your plate, not even considering that a succulent sweet peach is waiting for you when you get home. Instead, blocked from your mind, you decide to go see the new Jason Bourne movie, slam some popcorn with excess butter, lick your fingers like a cat and drive home contaminating your car with puffs of gas.
 
No peaches here. By now, your purchase has softened, the perfectly formed and textured fruit still giving off that awesome perfume, but not drawing a bite from you.
 
Because you feel guilty, you grab a peach first thing Thursday morning and hammer it before realizing the side you bit into is rotten.  “Yuck,” you toss it away, spitting out the brown mush, and take another. This one is slightly better, and you eat around the edges, but still, it’s not living up to expectations.
 
We leave plums out in our fruit baskets until they turn into prunes. Grapes turn aged and ugly, becoming hardened raisins. Peaches go bad. Why do we buy fruit that we should know will never get eaten? We presume we’ll break our habits and consume good, local, fresh fruit because it looks so good, and we KNOW we SHOULD eat it.

But that’s not enough, as experience continually demonstrates. Maybe our subconscious really wants to support local farmers. We know they need the money, so we buy from them way more than we need.
 
Then it goes bad. Do we forget about the fruit once it gets home? Do we think it will perfectly complement the décor around the stove? Does our impulse to purchase something knew overwhelm our common sense?
 
We’ll never know. It’s a battle between thinking you’ll actually do something new (like eat some fruit that you typically don’t) and letting inertia take over – sticking to your tried and true food purchases, which you know you’ll chow down.
 
Today I’m going to buy a bunch of plums, peaches, apricots, nectarines, cherries and kiwis, and gobble them up the instant I get home from the market.  Or maybe tomorrow.