RW208 - My Sober Birthday

This week, Dan and John talk about:

Having home-made brownies with butterscotch, adding unnecessary ingredients into food (Food and Drink)
Dan being impacted by the pandemic restrictions (COVID)
John’s daughter reading Little Women in class (Daughter)
How the quarantine affected John (COVID)
Still paying his YMCA membership, getting subscriptions as gift for somebody (Christmas)
Gift-giving for the holidays (Christmas)
Holiday traditions (Christmas)
John’s 26th sober birthday (Drugs)
Personalized ads on Twitter (Internet and Social Media)
What generation of podcaster is John? (Podcasting)

Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:

Listener Feedback (Podcasting)
Reconnecting with an old crush (Relationships)
Do names affect the course of your life? (Children)

The show title refers to December 10th 1994 being John’s anniversary for getting sober and quitting drugs.

The voices of John’s family are in my head and all the long dead members of his family are telling him that to purely survive is not enough, but you must strive to make the world a better place. One upside to the way things are right now is that there are lots of opportunities to make the world a better place.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

Having home-made brownies with butterscotch, adding unnecessary ingredients into food (RW208)

They briefly discuss if caramel might be pronounced ”karmel”. For John it depends on the context, but Dan will always say ”karmel”. The difference between caramel and butterscotch is that caramel is made with white sugar, butter and whatever else, while butterscotch is made with brown sugar with all the same rest of the ingredients. They also briefly discuss the difference between taffy, toffee, brittle and praline. Dan actually put those in the show notes.

Someone in John’s house made brownies last night, which is not usual, and John hadn’t had a homemade brownie in an uncountable number of years. The mysterious people that live in this house also put butterscotch chips in the brownie mix. If you had put an equal mix of butterscotch chips and chocolate chips, then we would be talking about a different thing. There are nuts in these brownies, too, which John used to object to and now he doesn't. A second ago he had to cough because a little fragment of a nut from these butterscotch brownies got caught tickling him in the back of his throat and he had to expel it. It was not coronavirus, but a butterscotch brownie nut.

He doesn’t have enough coffee and there are not enough chocolate chips in these butterscotch brownies. He would not pick butterscotch in general. He wouldn't kick it out of bed, but he would pick toffee because he likes a Heath Bar, and when he gets a Blizzard at Dairy Queen it comes with Heath Bar and Butterfinger because he very much associate getting a Blizzard with then spending an hour trying to get toffee out from between your teeth. Those are the best Blizzards!

Dan and John share a lot in common when it comes to being super-tasters and highly sensitive people. To Dan it is borderline offensive and quite jarring when someone adds an ingredient that is not necessarily meant to be there. For example Oatmeal cookies. Nobody wants just a plain oatmeal cookie, but you are going to put raisins in there. Then there are people who will put chocolate chips in there and Dan can't abide that and he is out because there is no reason for chocolate chips to be in an oatmeal and raisin cookie, or an oatmeal cookie at all.

The only thing you should ever put chocolate chips in is a chocolate chip cookie and if you really insist Dan might put some into your pancakes for you, but that is it! If you take a chocolate chip cookie and you start putting nuts in there, then it is no longer a chocolate chip cookie, but a rocky road cookie or something. Dan doesn't want unexpected nuts showing up in a desert of some kind, unless you know it is going to be there. It is too jarring!

John does not believe that there is any place that a chocolate chip does not improve the recipe, but it would never occur to him to put them in pancakes. He had them because he went to daycare, but he doesn’t want them now. Blueberries he can put in any kind of muffin or pancake, or John could have a chocolate chip muffin. To Dan there is no such thing, it is horrible. John is afraid that there are chocolate chip muffins and they are quite delicious, including chocolate muffins with chocolate chips in them and on them, which are Costco muffins that get bought by the pallet around here.

Costco is a Seattle company and a lot of people in the Northwest got in the habit many years ago of going to Costco. They sell a ubiquitous muffin that is bigger than a softball and they come in giant pallets and every cafe in the city has them, no matter if it is a fancy cafe or a shitty cafe - they all have the same muffins.

Dan argues that when you put a slice of ham into a grilled cheese sandwich, then it is no longer a grilled cheese. If you add something to a grilled cheese sandwich so that the ingredients are no longer just bread and cheese, it is not grilled cheese anymore. It might be a tuna melt, it might be a ham and cheese melt, but it is not grilled cheese anymore, but a ham and cheese sandwich that you grilled. John argues back that it is a grilled ham and cheese sandwich. they don’t call those melts or toasties in the Northwest.

John does grilled grilled ham and cheese sandwiches all the time. Some people would make the sandwich, butter both sides of the bread, and then put it in the pan, but John puts some butter in, he melts the butter, then he puts the first piece of bread down. He often puts roast beef, more cheese, and while it is still open-faced when the pan is hot, right as the bread is crusting, he throws a finger splash of water in there and then put a lid on it, which steams the cheese, so that when you pull the lid off 30 seconds later your cheese has become melted before you put the second piece of bread on. Then you put the second piece of bread on, flip it, throw more butter in there, and then all your meltedness is taken care of.

John likes mayonnaise, which is a very divisive condiment, and at one level he wants it on this sandwich, but at another level there is no way to get it on this sandwich. If you put it on the bread before you put it in the sandwich, then you got hot mayonnaise, which isn't a thing you want, but you can't take that sandwich apart once it is all glued together to put mayonnaise on there, so in the end John doesn’t put mayonnaise on it, but he does like mayonnaise on a sandwich, which is a line in the sand for people. The bass player of The Long Winters, Eric Corson, didn't even want mayonnaise in the room. He couldn’t stand it, not even the sight of it!

Dan describes that making mayonnaise is really easy because it is basically just egg and oil. John might just go ahead and try that. These days, why not make your own mayonnaise? It is like prepping, almost. What else is there to do? We are just sitting around. Might as well!

Dan being impacted by the pandemic restrictions (RW208)

Dan has an office where he goes to work and Haddie is there in his quarantine bubble. Has his life changed, given that he and Haddie didn't have 5 other people in the office with them. Dan didn’t go to the rifle range every week, he works out in his own garage, but pre-COVID Dan had a gym that he went to 3 times a week, he would usually go to at least 1-2 group meet-ups per week, whether that was with local friends or business people, and occasionally, once every week or two, there might be an evening gathering or meet up or something. He would be running errands and taking kids out on the weekends or in the afternoon sometimes, but all that had to stop.

Compared to somebody that had a job in a big business that they went to, that had a bunch of activities that were very social, that went to bars, that went to church on Sunday, their kids were on the football team, compared to somebody who has been dramatically impacted by COVID, would Dan describe himself as being dramatically impacted? No, he has only been moderately impacted. Basically all of the recreational stuff is gone. He can't go to restaurants, he can't meet with friends, but he has a small office where anyone who would be working in here is in his bubble of safety.

Dan was doing a lot with his kids that they can't do anymore. All the activities that they were doing are gone. You can't meet anybody, you can't do anything. Dan is meeting a friend tomorrow and they are going to be outside, 300-400 feet away from each other, wearing full hazmat stuff so that they can get a coffee. That will probably be the second time Dan has done that since COVID started. His work or his necessary activities have not really changed. Now when he goes to the grocery store, the people bring it out to him in a cart and they deal with whatever crap produce they decided they should get instead of the good stuff.

John’s daughter reading Little Women in class (RW208)

The other day she was in tears, saying that they wanted her to read this super boring book. She is an avid reader, she reads all the time, and John had never heard her say a bad word about a book. It is called Little Women (by Louisa May Alcott) and it is so boring. John sat with her and offered to read a chapter aloud to her so they could figure out what it is about it.

The language is archaic in a couple of ways, there is a lot of vocabulary and cultural references that she just doesn't know because she is a 4th grader and it is a little bit above her pay grade, but she is going to a mixed class with 4-6th graders and the teacher is trying to have group assignments that work for everybody, but there are probably not many kids in the class at the reading level so that they can really absorb a lot of what is going on in this book.

John’s kid is used to reading books where the point is the story and you are only using language to get to the plot as fast as you can. The books are just designed around: Margie said: ”Hurry up, get on the horse!”, Jean said: ”The horse needs hay!”, like so-and-so says, and then action, so-and-so says, action, while in Little Women every sentence starts with a quotation mark and then the sentence is: ”Someone needs to tell the teacher that I would be humiliated if they ever noticed for a second that my pickled limes had fallen out of my desk and rolled across the floor!”, bemoaned Joe. You never know who is talking until you get to the end of a long involved sentence about some social problem that a 19th century girl is having in all girls school.

John and his daughter worked on this, trying to decode not just the language, but the patterns of the language. When you start reading a sentence, if you are not clear who is reading it, it is okay to look ahead and see who is speaking and then reflect back and read the sentence again. This is a style of reading that the book is not just about the plot. We are not going from action to action, it is not adventure to adventure, but this is a book about manners and it is a book where the plot is a peer of just words as a wonderful thing. You are just here for the words and the way the words dance around each other, which is a new style of reading for her.

It is exasperating because she can't just glide over it like with Beverly Cleary. She has read so many books where the little Ocelot children go to the moon. There are 42 books in the Ocelot children's series, but there was going to come a day when you have read them all and it was time to move to the next thing. She is extremely sensitive about books that don't have female protagonists. She is not going to take that lying down.

When it comes to Tom Sawyer she doesn’t want to read a book about a guy named Tom, although there are girls in Tom Sawyer. It was one of the reasons she didn't want to read Lord of the Rings because there are no girls in Lord of the Rings. They are the elves! She loves Star Wars and there are barely any girls in Star Wars, but she said that was not true and ran down all the girls in Star Wars.

How the quarantine affected John (RW208)

John does not have many daily routines. Having your kid not be in school definitely is a dramatic thing as a kid owner, but after the initial four months of concentrated trauma, watching the school districts figure out how to do distance learning, trying to help his daughter through learning how to be on computers, it is now running very smoothly. Whether or not she is getting an education is a different question. John did not get an education in 4th grade of any kind, so she is getting a way better education than he got.

A huge part of his life was going out at night to see shows, to perform shows, going out with friends that are making shows, and talking about shows and whose shows are whose. He woke up this morning to a text from a friend who asked: ”Before Jim Roth joined Built to Spill, what was his band?” - ”Voodoo Gearshifts!” - ”No, the other one with Denise” - ”Oh, The Delusions?” - ”Yeah, the Delusions, right!” He is doing a show where he wants to talk about people that are doing shows, but he doing it online on somebody else's podcast.

That is a conversation that they would have once had at a bar, whether or not it makes the world a better place, who knows! All the stuff around shows has been John’s whole life since 1991, at least. Shows, shows, shows, shows! And he got zero shows, this last nine months was the longest he has gone without seeing a Rock show since he was 15, and the longest he has gone without seeing a Rock show times four. When he went on his long walk he didn't see any Rock shows for six months, but the first thing he did when he got back to Seattle, the second night he was back, he went to a Rock show.

That has changed John’s life in a major way, but it doesn't feel like it has changed his life in the way that other people's lives have been completely interrupted. It is not like he doesn't go to work anymore, or he doesn’t go to church anymore, or his life is completely upended. It doesn't feel like it. It feels like they turned a corner. In a way it just feels like he moved to the suburbs.

How far outside of Austin does Dan live? How long does it take him to get to 6th Street? From his office 10 minutes, from his house 18 minutes max. Dan lives a bit north of downtown, and a little northwest. When he moved here he was considered the outskirts of Northwest Austin and now he is borderline central. He lives Northwest of the college, and before COVID he was going Downtown very frequently. Headed up to his house he doesn’t take Red River, but he would jump on Mopac and head North, not far from the river, maybe 10 minutes. He is not far from Northwest Hills, not in the suburbs, but in Austin.

How far is the nearest record store? That would be the only record store Dan even knows about anymore, which is Waterloo, of course. There used to be a record store up there in Rosedale, a good record store. John did an in-store there one time and there was a guy there coincidentally, and he was an arch nemesis from years prior. John didn't even know he lived in Texas. He was playing this show and he looked up and here was this person that he hadn't seen in years, and he saw John and it was one of those strange moments. When you are playing an in-store in a record store the lights are up, it is different from playing in a club and you can see everybody's face.

The last instore that Death Cab ever played, John’s played with them, and it was like the Nirvana record release party at the old Peaches in the University District where it was very clear that they were now too big to play an instore in a record store, it was basically like a riot. John played this instore and the first row of audience were standing on the other side of his microphone as far away from it as he was from the microphone. It was just a face right there and it was impossible. If John hadn't been tall, it would have been terrifying.

What is nice about being tall is that you see that first face, but then you can see over people. John can always see the exit, that is what is nice about being tall. Even if you can't get to it, you can see it! The scariest thing for John about not being tall would be not being able to see clearly the path to the exit. It is not like you are tall and then suddenly you are not tall unless you are injured and then you are in a wheelchair and all of a sudden you went from being tall to not being tall, but for the most part you are the height that you are and you are used to seeing the world that way. Being able to see the path to the exit is very important to John.

John’s life continues to be improved by the quarantine, and that is taking into consideration all of the ways that the quarantine is terrible and things are worse. For his daughter it is not better and John wishes to God she could play with her friends. She needs it so desperately! But for himself, it has even changed his vocabulary, he now feels like he has to go to shows and now he doesn’t have to go to shows, and he doesn’t miss that at all.

Shows are not convenient for you. Your friend's band comes to town when they come to town. If it is a Tuesday night or if you had something else going on, or if you were tired that day, your friend's band is in town and they are not going to be in town tomorrow. You can't reschedule. Shows happen on their own time and you have to deal with that and John doesn’t miss that. He doesn’t miss going to the grocery store.

Still paying his YMCA membership, getting subscriptions as gift for somebody (RW208)

John has been paying his YMCA membership this entire year and he has not been one time. He felt bad about canceling it at the beginning of the year because it just seemed like so chintzy. It is the YMCA. For years he resented even having to pay for the YMCA, but now he doesn’t want to pull his money out of the Y and he just kept paying for it. Now it is going to be coming up on a year and he hasn’t used it one time. John is paying a lot of bills for things that he is not using right now just because in general it feels like he can and also that he should. The Y is probably not going to go out of business, but other things might go out of business.

Back when Dan would still have regular coffee he had a subscription for coffee, he has done the same thing with tea. He had one for different meats, they would send you different sausages and venison and that kind of stuff. But nothing now. John is trying to think of things to get for the holidays as gifts for people, and he is thinking to get them subscriptions to things, like Coffee of the Month or Wine of the Month, something that shows up all year. Dan wonders if John was thinking of him. John knows Dan likes meat and is very particular about meat and John would have to get him a high grade of meat. 6-7 years ago Merlin sent Dan some venison once that was really good.

Gift-giving for the holidays (RW208)

A few years ago here at the house John’s family had a thing where all the relatives came over for Christmas and everybody bought a bunch of presents for the baby because she was six years old and everybody loves a little girl. Everybody bought presents for each other, too, out of a feeling of: ”Well, granddad is coming, so everybody was going to get him a pocket knife, a keychain flashlight and a set of wool socks!”

By the end of the day they realized that they had engaged in an orgy of consumerism where they just bought too many presents and most of them weren't needed and it started to feel a little perfunctory, like. ”Oh, thank you for this!”, but none of these things are things John would have bought himself and they all went in a drawer. There are only so many keychain flashlights that he can carry, so they said as a family several years ago that they were going to do a Secret Santa thing, everybody just gets one present that they buy for one other member of the family, and you don't get to pick who that is, grandma is going to make the list and she is going to assign everybody a person to buy one gift for, and then everybody is allowed to buy one gift for the child.

There is only one real child in this family now, there are not even two kids, let alone six kids, so let's keep a lid on it, and that made Christmas feel peaceful and you didn't have that feeling at the end where you just had a bad taste in your mouth, like: ”Wow, all that did was ruin this child!” As a kid John felt a sense of responsibility when he got presents and you hadn't even begun to play with this present before you were unwrapping that present, and how can you possibly play with all these things? It takes you two months to rediscover all the stuff that you got on Christmas! Even if it is all small beer, it is still stuff you have to interact with and integrate.

This year they were talking about Secret Santa and gradually they realized there is nothing else to do. There has not been any fun, nobody has gotten any rewards, they haven't gone to a single birthday party in a year, they are not allowed to play, they are not allowed to hang out with their friends, why would they restrict Christmas? If you want to get a present for somebody, go for it! Why wouldn't he just get presents for everybody he knows, everybody he has an address for, send them something! Keychain flashlight, something!

Today is the first day of Hanukkah and Dan does a hybridised Hanukkah Christmas thing where they don't do Hanukkah presents, but they do the candles each night and then the kids get Christmas presents on Christmas. There was a while where they were trying to do both, but the kids really want big Christmas gifts, so it didn't work. When Dan was a kid they did Christmas a couple of times, but mostly it was Hanukkah and they would always save the last gift, the big gift, the one you really wanted on the last frickin day, the 8th day.

You knew the Q*bert Atari cartridge wasn’t going to come until the eighth day and in the meantime you got some Hot Wheels cars, some junk gifts for the first 6-7 days, and on the last day you get the thing that you really wanted, the land speeder or whatever. Eventually it would just be: ”Here is your Hanukkah gift!” and it was the one thing!

Dan tried giving his kids little things, like Hanukkah gelt or something like that, and that was fine, but now they just do the candles and there is an allure to the fire aspect of this. Their kids love the idea that they are burning stuff and lighting stuff and they fight over who gets to light it and who gets to light the other candles. They do not get into the prayer aspect at all, the blessing, they don't like that. They don't want to do it, they don't learn it. Dan has them repeat it back to him, but they don't want to do it anymore and he doesn’t know how to encourage that.

Holiday traditions (RW208)

Dan does not have a lot of family traditions. They have breakfast tacos every two weeks, little things like that, they take the trash out when it gets full, which is an important tradition in Dan’s house that was started when his great grandparents first came to the country. Dan sees John as a person who cherishes tradition and truly enjoys passing the traditions down as the way that the Rodericks do this, like every 7th Sunday the Rodericks go out on a rock hunt and find the smoothest pebble from the crick and bring it back and then eat the crawdad, that kind of thing.

There is a lot of that in John’s family and a lot of it is ad hoc. You remember a tradition as you are doing it and then go: ”Oh, this is a tradition! This is how we do this!” They don't wake up on March 1st, put on their golden smocks, go to the top of the lighthouse, and sing their song, but the family has some traditional songs that they sing and it doesn't take much to remember some family way of doing certain things.

John’s sister is really into that stuff, various members of his family will remember that this is the way and of course John is full of that stuff. He is also somebody that looks at the calendar and goes: ”Wow, is it December already?” - ”Well, yeah, it has been December for a week and a half!” - ”Oh, cool. Wow!” John just remembered that today is December 10th, his sober birthday. On December 10th 1994, 26 years ago, he quit drinking and had his last drug. It is a perfect example: That should be a traditional day of celebration and his friend Sean Nelson used to get him a gift every year. Dan would have gotten him something if he had known. Sean would remember it and John wouldn’t.

John’s dad's birthday was October 29th and leading up to it for a week beforehand he was thinking he got to remember Dad's birthday on Thursday, and then Thursday came and went and he didn’t remember and the next day you are like: ”Oh, yesterday was Dad's birthday!” You should go to your dad's grave and eat a banana, which is a which is a tradition that they have.

John, his sister, and his daughter go sit at his dad's grave and eat a banana in celebration of him and the way that he used bananas as a shorthand for so many emotions. His answer to most problems was: ”Have a banana!”, and everybody entering or leaving the house was offered a banana. He wasn't being funny, but it was unconscious. Bananas in his estimation were the perfect food. Dan’s grandfather was the same way and the first thing he asked you was: ”Want a banana? Have a banana!” This year they didn’t celebrate John’s dad’s birthday, they did not have a banana, they didn’t go to his grave.

A banana is easy to eat, it got potassium, and if you don't want to eat it right this second you can put it in your pocket and you can carry a banana around. You can a banana on the seat next to you in the car and drive home and eat it there. You can take a banana and eat it while you walk. Also, with a banana, unlike an apple, an apple can look great, but be not very good. It can be mealy and gross, an orange can look great, but when you peel it all of a sudden it can be one of those oranges that is no good. It is hard to peel, it got another little mini orange inside of it that screws the whole thing up, but if a banana looks good, it is going to be good, even if it is one of these tasteless modern bananas, you know what you are going to get. The color of the banana’s skin is going to tell you what kind of banana resides inside.

John’s 26th sober birthday (RW208)

Today is John’s 26th sober anniversary and he has no plans to celebrate it, he would not have noticed it if it hadn't come up in conversation, and he doesn’t know what he would do and what tradition he would have around it. For a long time it was a very private holiday and John was embarrassed when other people knew about it because he maintains that kind of privacy. John has very little privacy in terms of telling Dan or their listeners about the troubles he has had, the things he has been through, and there are very few things that he keeps private from people.

A lot of the things he talks about are things no one would normally say to an open microphone, but John is not shy about it and sharing it makes the world a better place. The fundamental principle of these shows and why podcasting is good is that we are so governed by shame and so many people feel shame that they are not even really aware is shame, about normal things that have happened to them or other people, feelings they are having that other people also are feeling.

There are feelings that we have that are unspeakable, even John, there are lines you don't cross, and these days people are a lot shyer about expressing even commonplace feelings because they are afraid of how the world is going to chastise them for having commonplace feelings, but for the most part we all have feelings within the same range. Why not talk about them?

John is an extremely private and even secretive person about a certain class of things, and it usually is something like his sober birthday. He would never put those words together for himself because he is not thinking of it that way. He is saying it that way because it is a shorthand for what it is. John would never normally reveal it and for many years nobody knew about it and Sean Nelson only knew about it because it came up in conversation one time early on and he just bookmarked it in his mind because he is a generous person. Sean gave John an engraved brass lighter once that had his sober anniversary engraved on it back when they were all smokers.

Why would John keep that a secret? To have that date be known by people would feel more intrusive to him than talking about that he had been in love with somebody who broke his heart or that he had been covered in shame a thousand times or even talking about the actual alcoholism and how hard that was. That is easier to talk about and has been widely known than something like the anniversary of quitting. Why?

John doesn’t understand what the types of privacy are and why you feel a sense of privacy about certain things and not other things. A lot of the Internet privacy stuff that people are so worried about, beyond just: ”Please don't steal my credit card information, please don't impersonate my identity, and please don't show up at my house!” John is not super-concerned with Internet privacy. There is a lot of stuff, a wider net, that all boils down to those three things, but John doesn’t think that hard about it and it doesn't stress him out.

Personalized ads on Twitter (RW208)

Personalized advertising is going to be a thing that drives John freaking up the wall, targeted advertising that addresses him by name, that Minority Report level of ”Hey, John! Have we got a deal for you!”, a movie that takes place in the near future starring Tom Cruise and in every direction there are little eye scanners that are scanning you and instantaneously identifying you based on your retina scan. So you walk in and it goes like: ”Hi Mr. Roderick, would you like to get another pair of Gap jeans to match the ones you bought last week?” and as you walk down the hall there is some other store that sees you and says: ”Come on in, we got a special on baseball caps!” or whatever.

That is the future and it is happening already and John hates it. Twitter just rolled out a new program where every 4th tweet that you see is an ad. Both Dan and John tweeted about it on the same day and it is the worst! Somebody @-replied John and said: ”Just block every Twitter account that feeds you an ad!” and he started doing it and at first it felt satisfying. He doesn’t usually block people anymore, he just mutes them if they are rude, but every single ad he blocked, but he started to realize he just blocked McDonald's and he is never going to see anything from McDonald's anymore and he felt nothing, which is great.

Twitter isn't throwing these ads up, but they are throwing up tweets from the social media account of Chase Manhattan Bank. It is a promoted tweet, so if you block the Twitter account of Chase they can't get another Chase ad to you no matter what. Then John got a promoted tweet from the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank because his social media account is also promoting tweets, and John blocked that, too. It turned into a game of whack a mole, but there has to be a finite number of companies willing to pay Twitter for promoted tweets.

John’s feed is already starting to be like: ”MIT's Department of advanced math has a new puzzle!”, the promoted tweets are starting to be weird. Twitter is not going to let this happen for long, this seems like a bug that hadn't occurred to them, but eventually they are going to say you can't just block every company, or maybe they won't and just display it as a straight-up ad right in the heart of your thing. At that point John feels like he has to get off there, and he is already feeling it.

That Minority Report business. John bought a thing from Nordstrom Rack six months ago, and they sent him an email every couple of days: ”Hey, we found a shirt that we think you will like!” - ”Oh, fuck off! No, you didn't! No!”, but John doesn’t want to put an email filter that blocks stuff from Nordstrom. He emails with Pete Nordstrom all the time, he can't just keyword the word ”Nordstrom”. This is Seattle, the Nordstroms are all around and you can't cut yourself off from the Nordstroms or nothing is going to get done around here! The Nordstroms are running the show in a way. John would have to block the word ”Nordstrom Rack” in quotes, but sometimes John is looking for those good deals.

Dan tells John about the options ”I don’t like this ad” on Twitter. John is afraid that he is helping them figure out the ads he wants, which is not a thing he wants to help Twitter do, help them refine their ad platform.

What generation of podcaster is John? (RW208)

They discussed this topic also in the aftershow of RW163.

One time a while back John was asking Dan ”What generation of podcaster am I?” and Dan wrote back and said: ”You are definitely not the first generation of podcaster, not the second generation. Dan was confused because somebody tweeted at him that Roderick on the Line originate from when John guested on Back to Work, but he thought it predated that.

Dan would say John was either second or third generation. John had read that there was a sense of podcasting as generational and people were talking about shows being a first generation podcast, which interested John, but according to Jochen’s Roderick on the Line episode page the first episode was Back to Work episode 31 on 2011-08-30 when Dan was out John was a guest, called ”You Can Polish AC/DC all day long”, and then the first Roderick on the Line show was little more than a week later, 2011-09-09, episode 0 ”Suit of Vomit”.

Merlin beforehand had a short-lived TV show The Merlin Show, which was a online video with him interviewing someone in a lawn chair. It was a video podcast. John was a guest on The Merlin Show more than once, but one time in particular, maybe it was only once, but it was absolutely proto John Roderick on the Line, just that you could see them both sitting in Merlin’s backyard. John just stumbled over Merlin’s wikipedia page, which his interesting.
He started You Look Nice Today in 2007, Dan started in 2006, but there was nobody listening to it and there was no way to listen to it, you have to download the file, copy it to iTunes, plug in your Diamond Rio, drag it manually over, this was before Apple integrated podcasts into iTunes. That happened somewhere in 2007/2008 that made it real.

If you were doing it before Apple integrated it into iTunes, you are generation zero, if you did it around that time or shortly after you are generation one. Dan thinks John was early enough that he was at least generation two. We are in generation 10 now. This next year will be the 10th anniversary of Back to Work pretty early on in the year and John will have the 10th anniversary of Roderick on the Line in the autumn, that is another anniversary that John is a little shy about, but less shy of course.

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Dan wants to encourage everyone to email them because they need the emails to flow at vt.5yb5|krowdaor#vt.5yb5|krowdaor or just go to 5by5.tv/contact and click on Road Work and it doesn't matter what your subject line is anymore.

Dan is excited to see that John is going to be getting one of those gaming mats in 37.5x69”. They are very intriguing because although he doesn’t have friends over to play Settlers of Catan he does do a lot of table based work. He sits and stacks and sorts and he likes a grippy surface. It is from what Viking Mats. It wouldn't have even occurred to John to get a tabletop map, but he is excited to receive one (this was probably a sponsor on the main show).

Listener Feedback (RW208)

Dear Dan and John,

my name is Nick. I am 41 years old, male, from England, my height is 6’3” and I weigh 187 pounds, my star sign is Cancer and I am a self-employed software developer with no fixed salary. I am a $10 a month Road Work supporter on Patreon. Road Work is Hands Down my favorite podcast. I cannot explain why I love it so much and if a friend asked me to describe it, I would be at a loss to explain what the show is about, and yet I have been listening since show one and have not missed an episode.

John, thank you for sharing your inner life with us. You have a genius for putting into words the most complex and nuanced feelings, many of which I can relate to. In expressing your thoughts and experiences, you have often given me a framework to introspect into the shadows of my own soul in ways I could not have done on my own.

Dan, you are a superb listener! Your comfort with silence in particular allows your conversations with John to really breathe and go to the most delicate places. I really enjoy your own contributions to the show as well, especially when you get all fired up about something. I also owe you a personal lot of thanks for not just this show, but other shows over the last 10+ years. I am a long time listener since the early days of 5by5 and yes: Your shows help people!

I could go on, but I will leave it at that. I appreciate you both. Please know that there is someone out there that wishes you well unconditionally just the way you are and whatever you may do. My best wishes to you and your families this holiday season! Your friend, long time listener, first time emailer — Nick

PS: I am sorry this email did not contain a question, but I would be delighted to hear it read out on the show all the same!

Reconnecting with an old crush (RW208)

Dear Dan and John,
23 year old male medical student, 5’11”, 135 pounds, receives $12.000 USD per year from the government like all Danish students in our free higher education. A few years back I became obsessed with a girl I have known since primary school. She began pushing me away. I finally told her what I felt to confirm that the feeling wasn't mutual and to try and move on, but we never quite became friends again. Our friendship ended up crashing pretty hard, in part because it was hard for me to accept we would never be more.

Four years have passed. She is still present in my mind sometimes, but I don't feel obsessed anymore. She will always be ”the one that got away”, and that is all right. but the ending still had a sting. Last month I sent her an email, asking how she is, mostly to indicate that things are good between us. We exchanged a few pleasant emails and it let a lot of old complicated feelings dissipate. I left it at that. The sting was gone!

A few weeks later she wrote again to thank me for writing and to apologize for how she left things. She told me she had been wanting to reconnect, but had been afraid it was too late. I would like to be her friend again, but I can feel myself starting to dream of a romantic future together. We are both single and I suppose it could happen, but I don't want to be the guy who can't accept that the girl he likes doesn't like him back.

I don't trust myself. I was obsessed with her for a long time. It might be that I just need to let old feelings dissipate, but I fear that it is ultimately unhealthy to reconnect. When we left things off, I blamed myself. In time I blamed her. In the end, we were both just young and handled things poorly. I tell myself that I have learned a lot since. Am I lying to myself? Will I ever forgive myself for not taking this opportunity to reconnect?

God bless! — Peter Cornelius Christensen, please feel free to use the name, it is fake anyway.

She is not the one that got away, or probably not. When you are 40 years old and you look back at your life, there will probably be someone that you think of as the one who got away. It is generally not somebody that you knew when you were 20 because with the person that is the one that got away you have to have been plausibly in a situation where you were prepared to pick The One and just because you knew somebody really cool when you were 20, unless you are somebody that gets married when they are 20, and maybe in Denmark they still do… the Danish language only has 74 words and maybe the word ”married” implies the age of 20, but probably not.

You are going to have a lot more things happen to you if you are 23 now and a medical student. There are so many other people that come and go through your life that when you are 23 you think that the person that you knew 2 years ago is the one but when you are 40, everything that happened between 18 and 27 is just: ”Oh yeah… I think I was in college then…”

But also the fact that she has reached out to you now after you had your communication where you were like: ”Hey, I hope we are cool!” and that all went well and then there was a little beat in time where you felt healed because you got to have that conversation and then she reached out again and said: ”Hey, I just wanted to say that that was great and I had been wanting to get back in touch, but I wasn't sure and I am grateful that we did!”, that is a wonderful thing for her to have done and now you are talking at a deeper level than you were at the time. You are talking at a meta level, you are talking about your relationship, which is not the same as being in the relationship and not knowing how to talk.

This is where nuance is so important and it is impossible for John to know how much you were getting from her in terms of subtext, but because you are talking at a meta level, it is now absolutely, completely possible to matter of factly address the fact: ”Hey, I fell romantically for you and it made things very difficult for me and I can feel that those romantic feelings would ignite without too much faning and just hearing from you again I feel them again.” The problem is that there is nothing worse than having romantic feelings for somebody and not ever saying it because you feel like you can't because it is going to ruin your friendship. That is such a terrible feeling!

Over the course of John’s own life he has felt it many times and you really have to ask yourself: ”What is friendship that would keep you in that state in order to be close to someone, and how often is it that you just want to be close to that person?” It isn't really about friendship, but it is always going to be about desire. John had a lot of female friends that he had romantic feelings for, but that were actually great friends and he really did enjoy hanging out with them and he didn't want to lose that hangout, but he was also never ever going to be just friends and not have feelings for them.

The girlfriend with the motorcycle boyfriend

John had an experience of a girl he worked with for 6-7 months at a Pizza Parlor and it became a joke at work where John would say: ”We should go out!” and she said initially: ”You are not my type!” - ”Well, right. Don't let that stop you! I am not your type. You are not really my type. But we are perfect together, so we should date!” - ”No, that is not how I look at it!” and this was all done in a spirit of banter. She was one of these people that would say: ”My last boyfriend rode a motorcycle up the stairs of my apartment building because he was that cool, because he left his leather pants drying on my windowsill!” - ”He sounds like a dick, but I am meant to be your boyfriend, even though you are a brat and a little repulsive!”

Months went on and they hung out every day and they always had this banter that would come up where John was like: ”Here we are again! Why are we not boyfriend or girlfriend?” - ”I love hanging out with you, but it is just not in the cards for us!” and one day they were at a cafe and John said something to that effect and she was like: ”Look, if you keep saying this, then we are not going to be able to hang out because it has become not funny to me anymore and it is starting to be oppressive!” - ”You know what? I will never say it again. I am absolutely sorry, I thought it had become a part of our relationship, that this was a running joke, and that is the last you will ever hear it. I will never say it again!” - ”Good, thank you!” - ”No problem!”

They shook hands, and she had to get going, asked John to walk her home, he did, and she was like: ”Come in for a second! I got a postcard for you!” or something like that, and John went in, they just kissed, then all of a sudden they were super-kissing and then they dated for a year and as soon as they kissed it was just electric. The problem is that when John said: ”I am never going to mention it again, it is over. I want to be your friend and I will not screw with it!” he sincerely meant it.

At that point he had been trying to get her to date him for nine months and she finally after all those months of teasing, playing, and joking about it said : ”It is not going to happen!” and John knew it was not going to happen and he was absolutely sincere. Looking back at it John has no idea, he has tried to remember that hour for years, what exactly happened? The fact that John walked her back to her apartment was perfectly normal. They did that every day, he always walked her home. The fact that she would invite him in was perfectly normal, he had been in her apartment all the time.

But what happened? John is not smooth, he does not move on people, if somebody likes him or he likes them he doesn’t even know how to make eye contact with them, let alone swoop in or say something suave. They got into her apartment and John was doing that thing where he was picking catalogs up off the coffee table and: ”Oh, look at this! The new J.Crew catalog is here!”, probably already thinking about getting to the bar.

John cannot recall the simple transition between him standing in her living room and her putting her keys down and taking her coat off and them kissing. He doesn’t know what happened in her mind either, because when she said: ”I don't want to hear this from you anymore!” she was sincere. Did she want to kiss him one time, just to make sure, just to see? She could have done that six months before! Dan thinks that as soon as the pressure was gone she might have felt okay about it.

In the whole year they dated this conversation never came up because in that year it all made sense and at the time she was very glamorous, tall, willowy, black hair, bright blue eyes, and she really considered herself above John’s pay grade because she was from San Francisco and she was a snob. She was raised in Boston and her parents lived in a warehouse, so she wasn't a Punk Rock girl that lived in a warehouse, but she grew up in a warehouse. She really thought she was hot shit. From her perspective when John was 23 he was some bumpkin, a hayseed from Alaska who had traveled quite a bit, but there was nothing glamorous about him, he wasn't cool, he wasn't in a band at the time, he wasn't a junkie, none of the things that made you cool in Seattle in 1993 applied to him, and they all applied to her. Just from a 23 year old grunge status point of view, she had tons of grunge status, beautiful and also regal. That is how people described her: regal, but also cool, and John was sleep outside rough.

When they finally started dating, after all the months of her saying: ”You are not my type at all! I like dark dudes, I like guys that look like tall Dave Navarro, I like them swarthy and fit and a little dumb and cool and motorcycle, and you are scruffy and sand colored and too talky and maybe a little bit too smart, just over that line where you are just too smart to be sexy, by those standards!”, but from the moment they started dating it felt like: ”See, I had been telling you the whole time that all of those things… Now when you look at me I am all you want and!” and two days before they kissed for the first time she was convinced that John was not at in any way what she wanted, which is prove that magic was afoot in the world, and it confirmed for John that he had powers that were greater than any Dave Navarro power.

continuing to answer the question

You are able to address the question of your romantic feelings directly and if her response to that is: ”I am still not interested in you!”, and you might already know this. Ultimately you are peers. She is not some otherling, but she is a person and she also got thoughts about you and life and romance, and the quicker you break down that blood brain barrier in thinking that she is over there and her thoughts and feelings are a mystery and you are over here and your thoughts and feelings must remain a mystery to her, and just get it out on the table, then she can say whether or not. She might say: ”I would like to give that a try!”, or she might say: ”I don't know if I am ready for that!”, or any of the million things that girls say, but you will know better and you will be able to judge.

Lately in his life John has had a few important relationships where the woman has floated it like a test case: ”If we weren't romantic, would we still be friends?” and the answer that they are looking for is: ”Yes, of course we would still be friends!” because it is a test case about: ”Do we just have a sexual relationship? Are you only interested in me because we are lovers?” and it isn't really a question of: ”If we weren't lovers, would we be would pals?”

Being pals is a weird thing to be in your 50s. It is not like in your 20s when you go out to the bar and there are all the same people that you see every day and the people at your work and the people that you run into on the street and of course you are friends with a lot of people and friends with your exes and now your girlfriend is dating your other friend and you have to decide whether you are friends with them. By the time you are in your 50s your world is a lot smaller in terms of who you see all the time.

John is never somebody who wants to just give a pat answer, like: ”Of course, baby!” That just sucks! Considering those questions: ”Would we still be friends? Are we friends?” he has had to say: ”To be lovers with somebody is not some tacked-on status. Like there is friends and then you tack on lover and if you make it through that, then you graduate to committed monogamous. It is not like a Pachinko game. Lover is its own thing!”

You can be lovers with somebody that you are not friends with for sure, and you can be friends with somebody that you are not a lover with, obviously. To be friends and lovers is a wonderful thing, but there are often situations where you have to say: ”For us to stop being lovers would be traumatic enough!”, unless it was a natural growing apart, but that is not what these questions are asking. They are not saying: ”What if over time we gradually slept together less and went to the movies together more?”

That is just a natural evolution, that is not a conversation. The conversation is always based around some traumatic event, like: ”If we stop sleeping together!” and the traumatic event can include: ”Now I have a boyfriend!”, or 100 other things, or: ”I don't like you that way anymore!”, but that is traumatic. To be able to say: ”We are lovers, we are not just pals, and lovers isn't an expansion pack on friend, it is another thing!” Transmogrifying to friendship it is not a thing where you just take away the lover part and what remains is friendship. It would have to be a transmogrification somehow, and that is not as easy as just saying it out loud.

What ends up happening in those situations is that there is some trauma, one of the people survives it easily, one of them takes it hard, and the one that takes it hard feels obligated to still be friends, but they are shouldering the burden of the trauma because the other one has moved on or whatever it is that splits people up, generally one of them is better off than the other, and the one that takes it hard is the one that has to suck it up: ”Yeah, we are totally still friends!” My heart is broken and I feel terrible all the time, but I don't want to be shallow and appear to not be interested in them anymore. That cuts both ways.

The two categories look a lot alike, but John had lovers that were the most important person in the world to him, but when they weren't lovers anymore he didn't want to be friends because they were not friends. Almost every person John has ever been romantic with started as a friend because he is not Dave Navarro, he has to employ the gradual magic of learning to see him as… There are people that look at him and say: ”He is very attractive, I am attracted to him without even hearing a word out of his mouth!”, but in general people are attracted to John because of a combination of knowing me and then feeling: ”Now that I know him, I see how handsome he is!”

This doesn't mean he is not handsome, but it is not an obvious handsome. It is the kind of handsome that to a passer-by reads as: ”He is a normal looking dude, not a bad looking dude, but he is fine-looking!”, but as you add the rest of it in, his appearance takes on new meaning. John is always friends with his lovers first, and a lot of the women he is friends with are always friends for life because he doesn't go into relationships with women thinking: ”I am going to be friends with her first and then lure her in!”, but he is just am naturally friends with women.

There are a lot of men and women who look at one another across a great divide and think of one another as the other and either don't believe they can understand the other or don't want to understand the other, or it never occurs to them to want to understand the other: ”That is the opposite of me and they have other rules and a relationship is finding the common ground between us where we get to make a certain number of rules with one another, but those rules don't apply to my world or to their world, we just have a common world with as few governing principles as we can get away with!”

This is true across every gender permutation. It is true in John’s male friendships, too. He has friends that are sports friends and John can't decode what their lives are like. They get together to watch a sports game. He has friends that are theater people and John doesn’t want to live in their world all the time, but as far as the in-general universe of people who identify as women, John likes that world, he likes the way they think, he likes that style of communicating and world building more than men. Men are boring, sadly.

That is where John always found friendship. It is not where he is looking for friendship, but in a group of five people standing around, the person that says the thing that interests him most is generally a woman, and he goes: ”Haha, that was funny!” and she gives him a finger gun and goes: ”Well, at least you got it!” and then at the end of the meeting when everybody else leaves, it is: ”Let's continue this conversation!” It often doesn't start as a romance, but once it transitions to it, it always remains a friendship.

John says that even when it often is an enemyship. A lot of the most impactful relationships he had with people that he was frenemies with. They start when they are in a meeting of five people and he says: ”Well, boobadiboo!” and a girl on the outskirts of the circle goes: ”Oh, boobadiboo!” - ”I am sorry, who are you?” - ”Never mind!” - ”Why did you just feel like you needed to comment on something I said?” - ”Oh, well, I just thought that it was really weird!”, like they come at him with some hostility, and of course John will fall for it, he is always intrigued by it and it gives the appearance of intelligence and the appearance of culture.

It is a strategy. A lot of people stand outside the circle and fling hand grenades in, not because they have any better ideas, but because they figured out that is a way to look smart and interesting. John had long relationships with people that he didn't really liked, but loved, and he doesn’t know what to say about that and he still struggles with that all the time. He can count on a couple of fingers the number of relationships he had where he felt like the other person was actually supportive of him as opposed to feeling competitive with him.

Dan’s reply

First of all he is 23 years old, not 33 or 43. He has a lot of life left to live and your brain doesn't really calm down and only when you are 25 your brain finally solidifies a little bit and is less jelly. That should not detract from the validity of his feelings or how he felt about her in any way, but when he says: ”I became obsessed with a girl I have known since primary school!” it is really hard to see past something like that. This girl that you had known that you had a crush on since you were a little kid and you always thought she was great. In his mind it probably goes: ”She is the one, we are meant to be. I have loved her my whole life. I just need to wait for her to come around. If all I can get is a friendship, then I will take it!”

That is the place he is in: ”I want her in my life. If I am given a choice between having her in my life and not, I will pick having her in it, even if it means that we can just be friends!”, but if it hasn't happened already, it is not going to be a John Roderick situation where the minute you say: ”I am cool being friends!”, that you kiss and then your date for however long. She had plenty of opportunities to be into him since primary school, and it never happened. It is not like they just met and a few months went by, but this is years and years and years and years.

Dan suggests that it is never going to happen. It is different from the situations that John described where he was friends first or not, and became romantic and then went back to being friends later after the romance part ended, and maybe he is still friends, but their listener never had a romantic relationship with her. They were just friends and then they were kind of not friends and now maybe they could be friends again, but it is not reasonable for him to think that he is ever not going to want to be with her, which is an unhealthy dynamic. It is not like he had been with her romantically and then they either individually or collectively decided it is not going to be that way and he made peace with it, but he has never had it, so he is always going to want it, it is just human nature. He still is in that state of: ”I really want this and I have wanted it since primary school!” and she is in the state of: ”Well, we can be friends!”

The old saying goes that guys and girls can't be friends. If a guy is attracted to a girl, he is always going to be attracted to the girl unless something happens to make him not attracted. Even then he might just get attracted in a new way. If a guy is into a girl, he is going to stay into the girl. For women it is different. If the girl isn't interested in the guy, he could be very good looking and have moves and whatever, and it is just: ”Meh, I am just not into him!” They could be around him an unlimited amount of time and not be into him. For guys it can be different and it seems to be a challenge.

Dan wouldn't suggest that he enter into a situation where he is going to be around her. He said that the sting was gone, but he is obviously still into her or he wouldn’t have emailed them. Dan reads the email as: ”I am still into this girl and maybe she is going to be back in my life now.” It is not good for him to be around somebody that he can't have and won't ever be able to have because he is only going to want it more. It is not going to go away, it is not going to stay away. He didn’t say: ”I have really moved past her! I don't want her the way that I did. I am okay being her friend. I see her in a different way now. I see her as a friend now. I have matured!”

Dan is worried that this will hold him back with actually finding the girl that does want to be with him, that is more right for him. He is going to be hanging on to this girl who is still going to be in his life, even if they only see each other a couple of times a week or whenever. In the back of his mind he is going to be holding out hope, which would be natural if he has liked her since primary school. He is going to meet the new girl and she is going to be: ”Hey, Peter, Cornelius, Let’s go bowling!” - ”Maybe!” and the whole time he is going to be doing the metal comparison of: ”Well, her hair is not as red as this other girl that I really liked in primary school. She is not quite as good…”

He is going to miss out on what might be the opportunity of his life to meet the perfect person for him, if there is such a thing, or even to just have a regular girlfriend for a while and not think about her because he is going to be in the back of his mind all the time. It sounds like she has never said to him: ”Let's see if we can maybe be romantic together. Let's see if we can have that kind of relationship!” and at the same time he has never said he wanted anything else. When he asks if he is lying to himself, Dan doesn’t think so. Will he ever forgive himself for not taking the opportunity to reconnect? He is asking for more heart break if he does it.

Dan is in favor of just being straight up honest with people. If he is legit not interested in her, which it doesn't sound like, then he should be fine just being her friend. Dan doesn’t hear that. 23 is so young! You got your whole life, you got nothing to lose! Go to her and say: ”I have liked you since primary school, and as much as I want you in my life, I am always going to see you in a romantic way. Do you see me that way? Could we have that? Could we be that way together? Is that possible? Is that on your radar? Can we try it? Because if not it might be too hard for me to be friends with you, as much as I really legitimately want to be friends with you, I want more than that, and I don't see that going away. What should we do?”

Have the conversation with her about it, see what she says! If you never had that conversation, then you have to, it would be the mature adult thing to do. It is nothing to be embarrassed about. Having feelings is not embarrassing. Having feelings that are not reciprocated is not embarrassing. Going up to a girl that you think is attractive and saying: ”Hey, I would like to take you out!” - ”I am sorry, I have a boyfriend!” that is not an insult, that is not an offense against you. Or if she just says: ”Oh, no thank you! I am not really wanting to date anybody right now!” That might be code for: ”You are not my type!”, or: ”I am not into you!”, but there is no reason to be embarrassed about it.

If your favorite sports team won and you said: ”Yeah, we won!”, are you embarrassed for having that feeling? If your little kid takes her first steps, are you going to say: ”I am embarrassed? I am kind of proud of my kid and they just took their first step!” No, of course not! Why are romantic feelings any different? Why should those fit into a different category that it is okay or you should be embarrassed of those and you are not willing to share them. And at this point Peter Cornelius doesn't have a relationship with her anyway. It is not like he could potentially ruin a long term friendship because they barely been friends, they haven't even talked. They are just considering reconnecting. Dan thinks he should be upfront with her about his feelings. It might change the way she looks at him!

Dan and John are on the same page. You just got to say it and take your knocks! It is not embarrassing to feel those feelings and it is not embarrassing to feel those feelings and have them not be reciprocated. What is real pain is carrying that torch for somebody for 30 years and never resolving it, always looking at people in the context of your imagination of this other person you haven't seen in decades. Almost all of John’s songs are about this, but the song Stupid is specifically about this. John actually had those conversations with people where 15 years later you are talking to somebody you haven't seen in a long time and John has said: ”Why didn't we?” - ”I know! Why didn't we? I liked you!” - ”Oh my God, yeah! I liked you! Why didn't we ever say that to each other? Oh no! That sucks!”

There was someone that Dan was friends with and he had known her in high school and a few years later she wound up transferring and went to the same college as him and they hung out then and nothing ever happened. Dan wound up running into her a few years later and they caught up for a few minutes and Dan said jokingly: ”Man, I was so into you back in high school and then again in college!” - ”What? I did too!” - ”Why didn't you say anything about it?” - ”Why didn't you?” - ”You were dating that bozo in the Volkswagen Beetle!” - ”I wasn't in love with him!” - ”Well, how was I supposed to know that?” They had a laugh about it.

He has to say something about it. He is 23 and when John was his age almost all of his regrets are: ”Why didn't I tell that girl that I liked her!” He doesn’t regret that he wasn't in his career, that he didn't have money or a cool car or a band even, but he regrets: ”Why didn't I tell that person that I was into them? Why didn't I handle that better? Why was I so embarrassed? Why was I so humiliated all the time?” Because if he had done those things he wouldn't still be sitting and chewing on the face of some person from his now distant past.

Good luck, Peter Cornelius!

Do names affect the course of your life? (RW208)

Hello, Dan and John!

In Roderick on the Line Episode 405 Merlin and John talk about names. John was lamenting the choices he and his partner made in naming their child, stating that a name is more of a reflection on the parents and not the child. I think society's response to the general nurture of the types of parents that name their children with conventional or unconventional names is at play in shaping a child and so a name has a dim reflection of the child, too.

What do you guys think? With Judeo-Christian conventional names like Dan and John, have you two noticed your experience differed than those with names like Kiefer? The notion came to me while working at a cat's only vet and there were three Dawns out of around 30 employees. Dawn may not be the unusual, but I had only known one other Don before this. I later worked as a temp for a national commercial real estate firm, and I was the only Dawn out of over 1000 employees. Thanks for your thoughts! — Dawn.

Dan knew a Dawn in 4th grade and he had the biggest crush on her and she was super-fun, she was really, really pretty, but she could be rough and tumble like a tomboy if she wanted to be and keep up with all the guys and outdo them and she was awesome and Dan thinks Dawn is the most amazing name, a very cool name, and more people should be named Dawn. He knew another Dawn that was dating a friend of his at KB Toys Store. She was really cool and really pretty and had a really great singing voice and she could belt out all kinds of Freddie Mercury songs and she was another cool person. Anyone named Dawn is just pretty cool!

John thinks of: ”Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on?” (lyrics of the song Delta Dawn by Tanya Tucker), which was a big song when John was a kid. He knew some Dawns. He always thinks of Dawn as having feathered hair, no matter what her actual hair is, John puts feathered hair on her. If Dawn is not careful, she might end up with a feathered roach clip hanging from the rearview mirror of her custom van. That is the risk of being named Dawn. The risk of of being named Dawn probably is not that you are going to have to choose between being the CFO of a bank or devoting yourself to nonprofit work, it is more that you are going to have to decide whether or not your pot dealer boyfriend is really going to be a good father to your step-kids. Those are all associations from the 1970s and has nothing to do with the Dawns from the 1980s.

Dan thinks a name affects who you become as a person. Tiger Woods, for example: Tiger is not his real first name, but it is what he always has been called his whole life. If you name someone Tiger Woods, it just furthers Dan’s theory that we exist in a simulation. If the weightlifter’s name is William Strong, of course he is a weightlifter. Tiger Woods, you got golf clubs, you got irons and woods, come on! Of course, he is a golfer, and of course we live in a simulation. It is so obvious! You can't be named Tiger Woods and not be really good at golf.

If you have a name like Kiefer Sutherland you are not just the kid in the back of the class, but you are going to do something. Kiefer Sutherland does something. Having a unique name in that way does affect who you turn out to be, regardless of whether it is a reflection on your parents for picking the name or not. Your name affects you because if you think about it: If every day somebody called you Dummy, eventually you are going to feel like a dummy, even if you fight against it. If Dan calls you John every day, that sound will resonate down to your bones and you will become a John. You will become John. You will embody John. You can't help it, because when every time somebody looks at you, they say the sound to you: ”John”. There is something to that! Sounds shaping who you are as a person. It does matter.

John’s life would be very different if he had been named Dan. If he had been named Dan he wouldn’t be where he is now, just that simple difference. Being named Dan would have changed him at every step of the way and right now he would be driving a custom van with his girlfriend Dawn and he would be taking her kids to the Y. John dodged a bullet there and he doesn’t know how Dan survived it.

Dan’s son was asking the other night how he got named and his mom completely said no to what Dan had wanted to name him. It was Cash Money Benjamin, and Dan was not kidding. This wasn't a joke. This is what he wanted to name him, but it got voted down. ”Imagine who you would be today if your name was Cash Money Benjamin?” There is truth to this, this is a real thing. It is not too late, Dan could still have more kids and eventually one of them would be named Cash Money. It is a good name, because ”Benjamins” are dollars, it got all three. That kid is going to be a millionaire by the time he is five.

If their listener is the Dawn that Dan knew in 4th grade at Palm Cove, please contact him because he wants to see what she has done with her life!

page revision: 1, last edited: 07 Apr 2022 19:38

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The Story of John Roderick

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