Teddy Roosevelt is a Ninja

This is a little partial story I wrote for a kid at work. The prompt was "Write a biography." What my student should have said was, "Write an accurate biography." Enjoy.

Theodore Roosevelt was a president of the United States of America. What most people don't know about him is that he was also President of the International Association of Ninjas. Teddy, as he was known in the dojo, was an expert in hand to hand combat. In fact, most of the "animals" he killed while hunting were actually other ninjas. His public relations manager later disguised each fallen ninja as a bear or mountain lion so that no one would know about Teddy's ninja secret.

On a Spring day in May, Teddy Roosevelt rode his horse, Samurai, into the woods. He was thinking about the latest IAN meeting, and how his friend, Robert Hope, had talked about possibly learning to use swords.

"The future is in armed combat!" Robert had yelled at the group of ninjas. "The enemy will be armed, and we need to be ready."

"The enemy" Robert spoke of was a secret group of assassins called The Death Machine. The Death Machine wasn't really as secret as its members liked to think. Teddy knew The Death Machine met inside the Baltimore Community Center on the first Friday of every month.

Before Robert had ranted about swords, the IAN had debated about the best time to attack The Death Machine's headquarters. Andy Rockefeller thought they should attack on July 4th, Independence Day. He thought ridding the world of The Death Machine on that day would be appropriate. But most of the IAN thought The Death Machine would expect that, so they'd picked a random date, August 23rd, for the attack.

Teddy was pondering whether swords would be a good idea for the attack on The Death Machine when a heavy something hit him from the side and knocked him off of Samurai.

Teddy sprung up from the ground and yelled, "Haai-yah!" at his assailant.

No one was there. Teddy spun around, expecting to see a member of The Death machine holding throwing knives.

No one was there...

(To possibly be continued)

As you can see, adjectives (like accurate) are important.

Seven-four-two thousand ten

Unfortunately, I forgot my real camera, so all my pictures from the Emerald Downs fireworks show on the third were taken on my phone, thus the terrible resolution. On the bright side, my phone has some functions my real camera does not, enabling me to do this:

On the fourth, we didn't have any fireworks, so Jason, Eric, and Dean shot shotgun shells at glow sticks. The theory was that when the glow stick was hit, it would explode. The reality was a little different.

As you can see, Eric is holding an intact glow stick (Yes, one. You might want to get that double vision checked out) and some glow stick pee and looks a little disappointed (and blurry) rather than excited. Lesson: Despite what the movies tell us, bullets rarely make things explode. Curse your lies, Hollywood!

But do you want to know what does explode? The guts of many pop-its while held in Eric's hands! So you see, we did have some fireworks after all.
 

I hope you all had a happy Independence Day!

I am an Orangutan, or What I'm Reading: Party of One, The Loners' Manifesto

What this book really sets out to do, though it takes a lot of detours on the way, is to redefine the word "loner." The author, Anneli Rufus, says we only use "loner" in bad ways. I agree with her. Almost every criminal--serial killer, school shooter, or otherwise--is labeled a loner, Rufus points out. When someone is weird, we call him or her a loner. We would never put Michelangelo in the same category, but he, too, was a loner. Maybe there's something wrong with the way we think.

One of the topics Rufus explores is why we think this way. To put it simply, it's the us vs. them paradigm. For the most part, primates--that's the us--are social creatures. In the past, we had to be this way in order to survive. Communities, and the people in them, relied on each other for success, love--everything. Anyone who didn't contribute to the community in the same way--there's the them--was looked down on. We still think this way, for the most part. But the question Rufus asks is, is that necessary? Her answer: not in this age of independence. And then she posits that we should make a distinction between true loners, those who want to be alone, and pseudo loners, those who are alone because they've been rejected by others.

Party of One is a very interesting book. Rufus takes the time to look at the fields that have built our culture--technology, art, music, literature, etc.--and shows how many of the people we revere as innovators and geniuses were also true loners. To name a few: Isaac Newton, Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alexander Pope, Barry Bonds, Emily Dickinson, and J.K. Rowling. If these are the people who change the world for the better, Rufus asks, shouldn't we be treating them better? She also takes the time to look at those who make "loner" a bad word, and she comes to the conclusion that they were not true loners. What drove the acts of murder and terrorism was their longing for acceptance and the pain of rejection, two things true loners don't ache for or care much about.

I never would have labeled myself a loner. I've always had friends, always hung out or gone to lunch. But my friend (Hi, Kirsten!) (See, I have friends!) lent me this book after a discussion one day about how I only enjoy people for a limited amount of time. And as I read, I started a checklist:

A loner...
*Prefers her own company                                                            Check
*Rarely gets bored or lonely on her own                                       Check
*Doesn't feel a need to conform to other people's standards        Check
*Is very stubborn about not conforming                                       Check
*Gets tired after being with others for long                                  Check


And etc. Hm, I thought to myself while reading, I guess I am a loner. And it's really not a bad thing. Even in the world of apes--notoriously social creatures--there are orangutans, who prefer to be alone.

Do I sound curmudgeonly? I almost feel like I should be hanging out a window yelling, "Shut up and got off of my lawn! And turn down that rock 'n' roll while you're at it!" Maybe the real problem isn't that I'm a loner; perhaps I was just born with a 70 year old soul and I've only gotten older since.

But being a loner, like Rufus points out, doesn't mean that you don't love or enjoy associating with others. It means you're picky, picky about when, with whom, and for how long you spend time. You're choosy. As one of my friends pointed out to me, I don't have that many friends, compared to most people, but I have more really close friends than most people do.

What I'm trying to say was that I enjoyed the book, even though I think Rufus spends too much time talking about how she thinks loners are better than everyone else and not enough time giving examples of how loners have changed the world. I admire her stand. I don't recall ever being harassed for being a loner, so the term really doesn't bother me personally. But I do think that there should be awareness on all our parts: you like to spend their free time with lots of people, and I prefer to spend their free time alone, but that doesn't mean either of us is a psychopath.