Not All Men In Cyperspace Are Really Stars

From Sunday's Times and News-Star

Guitar picker Brad Paisley warned us in song that guys can be “so much cooler online.” Just because I’m slow as a caterpillar carrying a tiny caterpillar piano on his back doesn’t mean I can’t run a 4.3 40-yard dash on the Internet.

It’s always foggy in cyberspace. 

So let’s be careful with that initial date when we meet someone for drinks and dinner that we’ve “seen” before only on a computer. To illustrate, I have a date tale from one of my Second Moms.

“OK,” she began, “I have a story for you…”

Few of hers have been as good – as bad – as this one. 

Since her husband passed away most unexpectedly only a few years after she’d retired, she decided to explore online dating. “It was more about being lonely than anything else,” she said. 

How about a dog? Great idea! Most shed less than a man.

But she wasn’t really home much so she had to give up the dog and try another route. We both hated that: dogs rock it.

“During my self-pity I decided to look at one of the online dating services,” she said. “Wasn't looking for a boyfriend. Just someone to talk to, maybe go to dinner. Never had a desire to but got curious. The range of guys was from 60-70 years old. Here is what I’ve learned from reading their profiles.”

Here’s where it starts getting good…

“Many are very Godly men,” she said. “I don’t doubt that but it’s almost too religious if there is such a thing.

“And they all have motorcycles or horses.

“And they lie.”

HA!

“Some are just downright scary,” she said. “One in particular gave me the heebie jeebies. He’s riding a mule and looks like he lives in a swamp.”

He’ll probably have a reality show soon, but there’s more to love than money. So my Second Mom passed and settled on trading texts with a guy who looked “OK.” They decided to meet in a Shreveport/Bossier casino. Safety first: my girl knew there would be people around.

“How can I describe him?” she said. “Let’s see: his profile picture is probably 10- to 12-years old. His description was 6-3 and 245. My description of him is he had neck problems, was kind of stooped, and the lies kept coming for five minutes until he stood up to go to the boat. I said I thought we were going to talk a while first. He sat back down.”

Eventually they piddled around on the boat a bit, then he followed her to a local diner. 

“He apologized for his appearance,” she said. “Huh? The reason he had trouble talking was that he only had four or five teeth. It didn’t matter because by this time I knew we were not a match. In parting he added, ‘You’re a cute little thing.’ OMG.”

She actually wrote that to me. “OMG.” At which point I was ROFL.

(OMG means “Oh my god” or “As if” and ROFL means “rolling on the floor laughing” or “HA! I just spit up chocolate milk through my nose!”)

No matter your age, some things – some reactions – in the dating game never change. “OMG,” she wrote in summary of Dr. Debonair’s closing line. So beautiful.

“He later sent a note that he was interested, was I?,” she said. “I still haven’t answered that.

“I want to emphasize this. I was extremely cautious. I was never alone with him and considered my safety first and foremost. Been there. Done that. Case closed.”

Turns out both my Second Mom and my science teacher were right: there are vacuums in space.

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'Follow The Rules And Follow The Mules...'

From Sunday's TIMES and NEWS-STAR

“We're in the Army now.
“We’re not behind a plow.
“We’ll never get rich diggin’ a ditch.
“We're in the Army now.”

When you apply for an appointment to the United States Military Academy and begin receiving letters in the mail from West Point, it has to be both thrilling and intimidating.

But when your Army-issue boots arrive, and they sit there in the closet with your high school tennis shoes and your Sunday shoes and your flip flops, looking a lot more mature and grown up than your other shoes, all standing tall and at attention and whatnot, then things start to get real.

At church Sunday, a proud and somewhat rattled mom showed me just such a picture, the floor of her baby boy’s closet and the new size-13 boots. Maybe size 14s by now. (He has a “firm foundation” either way.)

His mom also showed me a picture of his nameplate and other things that will be sewn onto his uniform. And not a high school athletic uniform, but a uniform worn by members of the United States Army.

Big-boy stuff.

In less than two weeks he will a high school graduate. In late June, he and his boots leave for West Point, where he’ll become a member of the Corps of Cadets. 

The military. The U.S. Army. The Thin Gray Line. That kind of a deal.

“We’re in the Army now …”

Just the other day when I met him, he was in the eighth grade and I was the grownup in charge in his Sunday school class. We didn’t cover how to cook a baked potato in the wild or even how to quarter a well-fed ox for sacrifice, much less how to dig a foxhole, repel off a mountain or fire an M1. How could I have known? Who knew Josh would apply to be in the military? It’s like predicting Bozo would grow up to split the atom.

I’ve watched him and some others in my step-daughter’s graduating class “mature” these last few years. I’ve seen this particular guy act like somebody I used to know, which would be me. 

As a preacher’s son, he is as goofy as I was. Maybe even a bit more. Once in a high school football game he caught a pass and got cracked on the helmet and knocked into next week’s game, and they had him on the sideline, asking him to count fingers and answer questions, and I asked the people around me, “Unless that doctor knows him, how is he going to know if Josh is OK or not? If he’s acting crazy, for him, that’s normal.”

Unless you don’t like teenaged boys who are a brick shy, whether they’re acting or not, it’s impossible not to have a fondness for him. Besides being crazy, we have other things in common, like a crush on my wife. But he was recognized by Shreveport’s chapter of the National Football Foundation for scholarship, and was on the all-district football team, so he is much smarter than I am, and a better athlete. He is also much more brave. 

I have told his mom that if she starts to miss him, I will come over to their house and eat everything in the icebox, just to make it feel as if he’s still around. But like so many other moms, she’ll have to come to grips with the sad truth that parenting ain’t for sissies, and that you grow them up to leave and become independent, and then when they do, it sort of hurts your feelings in a way that’s weird. You almost feel guilty. You definitely feel sad. I did. Still do.  

He’s breaking his boots in this summer so they’ll be ready for – of course -- boot camp, all of July and August. And while he doesn’t mean to, at the same time he’s breaking a piece of the heart of the first and only sergeant he’s ever had – his momma’s. But even the part that’s broken is proud.

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A Competition And Cause To Pump You Up

From Sunday's Times and News-Star

Zack Weissmann gets pumped by lifting weights, by training people in CrossFit, and by the little rectangular machine that’s almost always clipped by his waist.

An insulin pump. A 24-year-old with a college degree in biology, he’s worn the pump half his life.

“Every living memory I have, I’ve had diabetes,” Zack said. “I don’t know anything else. I’m blessed from the aspect that I grew up not knowing what it was like not to have it.”

Zack was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, a lifelong debilitating disease for which no cure currently exists, when he was 21 months old. All these years, while playing organized baseball or soccer, track or football since age 5 through high school, while on the powerlifting team in college, while becoming certified as a CrossFit trainer, he’s been the diabetic on the team. Doesn’t seem to have slowed him down.

“I can do anything anyone else can do,” Zack said one morning this week after leading a CrossFit class in Ruston. “I just have to be aware of what my body’s doing.

“It is what it is,” he said. “I went through a time at 11 of 12 when I didn’t want to listen. Hormones kicked in. I wanted to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I was self-conscious with the shots I had to give myself; that was part of it. But then I was able to get the pump, which I hardly even think about now. And I decided that if anybody asks me about it, instead of being self-conscious, maybe it gives me a chance to help educate them.”

Zack has a couple of partners, both in research-for-a-cure support and in spreading the word of the dangers of Type 1 and the acceptance of living with it. Those friends are the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and also a Shreveport organization that has benefitted the JDRF in a record-breaking way.

The fourth annual Shreveport Diabetes Golf & Tennis Classic is May 17-19 at East Ridge Country Club. If this young fundraiser were a golfer, it would be way, way under par going into round four.

Consider that as a startup in 2011, all Shreveport’s Robbie Gaiennie and Joe Sterkx were trying to do, realistically, was raise $10,000 a year for the JDRF; two of Robbie’s brothers had died from the disease before age 50, and her son, now 15, had been diagnosed at age 4.

Armed with not much more than a willingness to work and a passion for fighting what Sterkx calls “a brutal, brutal disease,” the pair have parented a tournament that has the chance in two weeks to exceed the $250,000 mark in funds raised through four years.

What began as a stapled four-page flyer from a copy machine to announce the first tournament has “exploded,” Sterkx said, into a format and system of organization that the JDRF wishes to copy nationally. Plus, there’s that quarter-million dollars – that’s above the annual cost of putting on the tournament -- toward research.

“We’ve got a loyal group of volunteers, a strong board, wonderful members and staff at East Ridge who are willing to help, plus supporters all over the community and individual and corporate sponsors who’ve really gotten behind this,” Sterkz said. “You’ve got to have a passion for it and you’ve got to work your butt off; add to that the people who are willing to go above and beyond to help kids, and that’s why we’re a success.”

To play or to get involved, go to shreveportdiabetesgolf.com or call (318) 584-2300 or (318) 453-3051. To help immediately, make a difference for a teen with diabetes through education and encouragement.

“I have a cousin back East who was diagnosed at age 14 or 15; he’s a couple years older than me,” Zack said. “He’d lived one way for all those years, so now he’s not sold on eating right and doing what he needs to do. I tell him to come on, that he’ll get used to it. I guess it’s denial to a certain extent…he hasn’t died yet and doesn’t think he’s going to die.

“I’ve had the proper support structure around me; my family’s very supportive and I’ve learned what works for me and accepted it and I keep going,” he said. “It just makes sense.”

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