Category Archives: Word Play

Odd words, phrases and jargon from about the world and web

Why Your Love Language Doesn’t Matter

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Have you ever found something so revolutionary that it changed the way you did things? In my life I have found a number of things that made my head spin, my world clearer, or my world bigger. In the late 90’s one such idea came from a book that really got me churning that was called “The Five Love Languages.” It seemed to make relationships between a husband and wife simpler and easier to grasp than the odd complexity I had developed prior to reading it.  It made me want to explore love with my bride-to-be.  The problem with such concepts as the five love languages is that people hear them, learn them, or come into contact with them and them get set off in the wrong direction because they don’t understand them as merely principles.

If you’re not familiar with the five love languages let me give you this simple list of the five:

  1. Words of Affirmation
  2. Quality Time
  3. Receiving Gifts
  4. Acts of Service
  5. Physical Touch

The gist of the book is that each person has a primary way that they perceive  and express love with their spouse.  Furthermore each spouse is strongly encouraged to explore their partner’s love language and keep that in mind when expressing love for him or her.  I spent quite a bit of time liking the idea of focusing on exploring my bride’s love language and even figured out that this could be used, in a modified way, with my friends to express care for them.  Ta-da!  So did the book’s authors and other books in the series of love languages and their application were born and money was had through conferences, tests, merchandising and copyright infringement lawsuits from unlicensed tattoos [I made that last one up].  This is psychology stuff, so I’m sure that someone also discovered a sixth, seventh and eighth love language and has been trying to write papers proving the adequacy of those numbers of love languages for thesis papers and making a good practice out of helping marriages and relationships discover their tertiary love language.

Here’s the rub: this is overly complex despite the simplicity and it gets used as a poor excuse for husbands and wives to not love one another.  At least not to their fullest.  I want to explain that moving forward from here I’m going to be focused on a few Bible verses that I think make the five love languages childs play, and probably unnecessary.  The first place we should take a look is Ephesians 5:22-27:

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.

What I see as I meditate on the above passage is something beyond the five love languages and something that should drive a wife absolutely coo-coo-bananas in love with her husband.  A self-sacrificing husband.  A guy who takes the five love languages in, sees their inadequacy, and says, “I’m going to love you in a million ways, and these five are merely a tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg.”  I recently saw on Twitter a guy who said that he was sorry to his wife (publicly on Twitter?) that his primary love language was acts of service.  Lameness.  If her love language is knitting pot holders it doesn’t matter.  If his language was bringing stray cats home to be fed, bathed, and neutered it doesn’t matter.  Sacrificial love trumps all of the given concepts of love languages because it looks for opportunities to love in every aspect, every place, and it is not strapped to a single, primary concept of perceived or expressed love.

As a secondary point against not stopping with this love language concept is that one of the joys of my marriage with my wife has been exploring each of the facets of expression of love and trying to see how they can be expressed in deeper, more meaningful ways.  Just as humans mature (or at least should mature) we look for ways to express love in a sacrificial, yet exploratory way.  To make a food analogy just because I like vanilla ice cream doesn’t mean I don’t explore toppings, other flavors and other combinations within the world of ice cream (or frozen desserts).  The same analogy applied to music means I don’t stop at the Beatles just because I like rock and roll quartets.  Bring on trios [Cream], duos [Simon & Garfunkel], classical, dance, beat boxing, and opera*.

I’ve discovered that my wife pretty much likes all five love languages [in different quantities at different times] because she knows that they’re expressing love to her.  I would probably not be wrong in saying that 99.999% of guys love physical touch [which often gets interpreted as physical intimacy, and for the sake of argument I’m going there now], but if let us face the facts: not all gals are wired for 24/7 physical touching and there may come a time when they’re bleeding, PMS-ing, medically unavailable, or holding a kitchen knife.  It might be a good time, Mr. physical touch, to explore the finer nuances of quality time, words of affirmation, gifts [read: chocolate], or acupressure to relieve headaches.  Sacrificially speaking get a grip, turn off your hormones for a moment and love your wife some other way so she doesn’t feel the need to lock herself in the bathroom, wear chain armor, or buy a slice-wire-bikini from Victoria’s Secret Weapon.

I want to close by saying I don’t hate the general principles behind the five love languages.  They were a good starting point for me and helped me grasp why I might be miss-communicating with my bride-to-be.  They’re not an excuse to be short sighted, justify weaknesses, or get in a rut.  Make it a point to look for ways to create a richer, more complex relationship with your spouse by abandoning your love language and loving with your exploratory, revolutionary hats on.

*Stay away from country music which is an infectious disease [Just kidding (Not really)]

Filters & Feathers

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I am not lying to you when I say I have bought a new filter for my shop-vac.  That’s right, I have a shop-vac with a new filter and I am ready to use it.  I am ready to make that filter wish it was never born.  It will be like so many washed up Hollywood starlettes wishing that it had stopped sniffing in the powder that I am about to rub off of my walls in an attempt to make them look nice.  The walls will be drywalls, but the shop-vac is a wet-dry shop-vac so I could in theory saturate the walls with water and the vacuum would still work!  Of course a house with saturated walls is not a house, its a home for Sponge Bob Squarepants.  Given the past owner’s penchant for hacks, shortcuts and setting up electrical situations that are sure to start a fire, I think I’ll keep the walls dry.

I’m trying to wrap up the wall work so that when my in-laws come next week for Christmas festivities we all enjoy time together and not working to wrap up the wall work.  In some countries this is unheard of, but mostly because they have not knocked the non-existent wall out from between their non-existent two rooms.  With that in mind, be like congress and stimulate someone’s economy like Cash for Clunkers, only because there are folks in need of chickens we’ll call it Cash for Cluckers.  Take some time to look around the World Vision site and buy a goat, some chickens, sheep, or even help fund a well.  I’d much rather have water be able to get into their lives through a well and have the problem of needing a wet-dry vac.

Speaking of which, does Dyson make a sand sucker?  Because I’m thinking in some of the places I’ve seen pictures of they need that.  Wait, they don’t have electricity… ZAP!!

My Bride Now Homeschools the Now 4 Year Old

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Jessica is presently in the other room schooling the 4 year old. How did the girl turn 4?! Blows my mind. Anyway, she’s being schooled on greater than and less than and I think she’s got the concept down. It tends to really register once you put the lessons in candy form. Fortunately its autumn and the season calls for candy.

Next month I hope we can teach her pie charts with real pecan pie.

I Have a Family

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I’m pretty sure that some of you will be wondering about now if I have forgotten that there is a wife and two daughters and a sister-in-law that are part of my life.  I love them dearly, but basically since the beginning of the year we’ve been either sick or traveling or both.  I need to force us all into the same room and force us all to make ridiculous faces so that we can have a picture to post so that those who are more distant will see more closely how crazy we are in digital form.

I love my family and to my knowledge we’re all healthy, Abby’s school is going well as is her dance class and Jessica is starting Evie in gymnastics on Monday next week.  I’m not sleeping tonight (I’ve been up since about 3) for no apparent reason, but I figured I’d take a stab at putting information on this blog that folks might also read.

While I haven’t blogged a lot lately I am posting weird bits on Twitter and you can follow some stuff (and repeats of what’s on Twitter) on Facebook.  Just for fun here are some updates from Twitter that I posted last week on a business trip:

Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: listening to some hip hop bit at the airport. White & nerdy indeed [weird al reference].
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: customs had *4* sitting employees not open. they were chatting whilst we stood by.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: Toronto International better deliver on some cheese after this rat maze.
Canada, you get an “eh” for effort.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: applebutter BBQ sauce for the gigantic win. [seek this out]
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: “These are our dog’s and ponies.”
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: dog & pony show went well. They want to use a few one trick ponies in another movie.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: if we catch the rabbit down this trail I’m totally cutting its foot off for luck.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: note to self disable EVERYTHING but PowerPoint. Kills bings, bongs, & popups.

All of those “Tweets” [and more!] were done while on a trip with a great guy, marketing director, and handy travel companion, Kevin.  I’d tell you more but I’d have to grill you.

Dude, There Are Geeks on the Internet

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Creative Commons: The Eggplant - http://flickr.com/photos/eggplant/4491902/

Creative Commons: The Eggplant - http://flickr.com/photos/eggplant/4491902/

In case you didn’t notice, there’s a place called Wikipedia.  They have an outrageously large amount of data and apparently a good chunk of it is relatively accurate.  Take for example the entry on Pi.  That would be a reference to the mathematical constant.  If you wanted to, you could follow the links on that page to other references such as the Greek letter.  There is far more information about Pi on that page than any encyclopedia editor would allow.  That’s because an encyclopedia is about terse, rich data.  Wikipedia is about excessive information because its storage, retrieval and modification is so cheap that limiting the data is probably more work than just tacking on more information as its available.

Lets put this in perspective: the cost of printing any book could run into the millions upon millions of dollars depending on all of the people involved.  The cost of putting together a web page is non-zero, but its microscopic in comparison.  If web publishing were more expensive there would be far fewer ‘get rich quick’ sites.  Lets get back to Pi.  Apparently people have memorized thousands of the decimal fractions of Pi.  Most encyclopedia entries just don’t care about this data, but Wikipedia has further information and a line chart showing the rise in numbers memorized by an individual over time.  I have 2: 3.14.  That’s 200% more than I currently need due to the absence of circular math (so far) in my job.  I have to figure out many other formulas and algorithms, but Pi is distinctly absent from my daily, weekly, monthly or yearly math needs.

In case your encyclopedia is feeling small, just remind it that Wikipedia also has entries on such interesting topics as international Pi day (a day to celebrate Pi).  I think I would celebrate by eating pizza and pecan Pi.  There appears to be some discrepancy about what other days might be celebrated along with Pi because of rounding.  I’m not making that up.  Geeks, trivialogists, dataheads, nerds, and specialists all pile in more data so that if Wikipedia is missing something important you can go to Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, Ask.com or any number of other search engines to get even more information.

Sadly, there is a space on the internet called ‘the deep web’ [of course you should see the wikipedia article] which does not know the love of the search engines.  It is a place that is undocumented, hidden, secret and fully of kitty porn [to my mother: that link goes to a humor site and is not naughty].  It is a place where people are trying to get to, apparently, because I have seen articles on how to find information on the deep web.  Here’s some irony for your wrinkled brow: if its unsearched, unindexed, and unknown you’re going to have a hard time using traditional methods to get to it.  Never fear!  There is the power of human search.  Mahalo, Twitter, Digg and the like all use humans to traverse the Interwebs and post links.  You may wonder why I mention Twitter, but the answer is simple: if you go to twitter, create an account, and then get enough followers that people all over the world at any moment could be reading your tweets: people all over the world will read your tweets and possibly reply.  Its human powdered search.  That which was untraceable is now so easy to find that even disreputable presidents who are mocked for not speaking in complete sentences could hammer out a 140 character or less question and get links back from the 14 people who follow them.

So, in short, which this isn’t, the Internets have lots of great content.  There’s the Internet, Web 2.0, and the latest news I have is that CSS3 is coming, and then we’ll probably start seeing early betas of Web 3.0 in 2009.  If web 3.0 gets too slowed down there is a good chance that the economic stimulation checks, bailouts, and IPO’s will help move things along.  And worst case scenario we’ll all be able to eat our free Pi from Wikipedia.  Of course you’d wipe your mouth with your pi tie.

International Super Model Disaster Averted

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In case you didn’t know it British singer Seal and German Super Model wife Heidi Klum announced before the November election that they would leave the United States if McCain won [source].  Because if there’s anything that sways American voters it is the threat of foreign celebrities leaving the country [they do have two children who are US citizens].  When you can charge as much as these two do for shows, appearances, and modeling I think its pretty safe to say that they could live in Mexico, fly to work every day, and still not panic about their finances.

I’m grateful that Senator Obama is now President Elect Obama because its rather clear that Senator McCain’s impact on world entertainment would have been devastating.  It’s nice to know that Obama has the Seal of aproval from at least one super model.

Dear NBC Olympic Editors

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Hi, its me, Randy, I just wanted to drop you a line to say, “We don’t need any more Volleyball coverage,” and also, “Can you edit the BMX video down to more BMX and less announcer garbage?”  Thanks.  Because I love global athletic events as much as the next bipod, but I really, really don’t like the 5 minute commercial breaks and the 1.5 minute BMX races wrapped in 5 minutes of announcers with diarrhea of the mouth.

We don’t need to hear the announcers saying things like, “They really can’t afford mistakes like this in an event of this caliber.”  Really?  I had no idea.  I thought that the Olympics were like kindergarden for the X-Games.  I thought that the athletes would be scored by how many wounds they could get from crashing, falling, slipping, and gashing their heads on diving boards.  Its a good thing the announcer is there to help my make up for the brain cells I’m losing from watching all of those 5 minute long commercial breaks.

One last thing: Michael Phelps is an amazing athlete and I respect him a lot.  But I don’t need to see replays of his wins as the start and finish of every viewing session.  I leave you with the immortal words of Merlin Mann:

NBC’s stirring piano score makes this montage of memories from 10 days of watching TV recaps of time-delayed sports highlights VERY moving.

The July Fireworks Series of Aurora

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The idiots specially gifted people in my neighborhood have been lighting off fireworks around my house for the last week just to make sure that their ears still work and that the fireworks continue to make loud popping sounds.  Their sober under-aged children might have some serious, lifelong emotional trauma if their intoxicated parents didn’t light off loud and visually stimulating fireworks from their homes on July Fourth – so they do it starting in June.  Last night for example I was doing an exercise that I like to call ‘sleeping’ and a neighbor was shooting off some sort of popping whirring thing (I grew up in Nevada where they kill people who have fireworks before the fireworks kill them, so I don’t really know which type of firework it was).  If it was before 10, I might have thought I was grumpy, but it was post midnight, so I figured that there was some special problem with their ears or fireworks because they were still testing them.

I’m considering buying some fireworks and lighting them off myself next year because there seems to be this sense of amazement and awe that can only happen if you do it at your house.  I have never wanted to do this.  Fireworks amaze the girls, and I love it that they’re impressed, but I draw the line at exploding them at my house because I like my house.  I want my house to keep not burning up, and continue not needing to be repaired due to fire damage.  I’m a selfish guy like that.  In a dry climate like Colorado, you could light a fire just by wearing corduroy paints that rub together a while and then sit down on some dry wood, so inviting danger to my house to come and blow up is not my first choice.  OK, I’m done considering this option.

However, my first choice is to let other people,  with fire fighters nearby, light off the fireworks.  Each year many cities across the country do this in a celebration called, “lighting your tax dollars on fire and sending them off to blow up,” and we live in one of those cities.  We’ve managed to never see the show they do because of rain or any number of other silly reasons, but this year, we just might go… that is if our neighbors don’t manage to blow us up first.

They Found Water on Mars

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Apparently Kristen Bell, AKA “Veronica Mars” is made up of 70% or so of water.  NASA, with millions and billions of dollars in research money sent an exploratory probe into Miss Bell and discovered that she did indeed have water in her and on her surface.  Unfortunately since she’s now on Heroes with the ability to throw lightning the presence of water on mars is less exciting because lightning usually comes with storm clouds and humans, who are typically made of at least 70% water, don’t usually count as a big deal when you find water on them.  You can read more about NASA’s non-discovery here.