Image by Steve A Johnson

When I was kid, the subject I hated most in school was PE.  Even in the seventh grade, it seemed like a barbarous hour in the middle of the school day where they forced us to put on sweaty clothes and compete in team sports.  Some kids were so competitive that it made the whole exercise unbearable.

The competitiveness was encouraged by the teachers (we called them coach—even though they taught History too).

I didn’t mind PE when it involved a non-competitive sports.  I liked running and solo exercises.  But, I was an exception.  Everyone else wanted to play a team sport, so that’s mostly what we did.  I went to 3 different junior highs and 3 high schools.  All of them were the same.  We played basketball, softball, and soccer mostly.  Occasionally, we would play tennis.

Here’s a typical PE class.  Everyone gets dressed and heads out to the blacktop (tarmac) to form up (very Army like).  We do a few stretches.  Then, the coach announces that we will be playing basketball today.  He chooses the two best basketball players as captains.  They each take turns choosing the rest of the class for their team.  The good players go first.  I was frequently last.  In fact, there was another kid who was sometimes chosen after me, but not all the time.
Then, we’d play an awkward game of basketball.  I say awkward because I would never actually want the ball.  It’s not easy running around the court trying to look like you are involved and helping the team, but constantly putting yourself behind the person guarding you so you would never get the ball.  I run around and wait to be called in to shower.

Showering in junior high was weird too.  No one wanted to do it, but it was a requirement.  They used to have a shower monitor who would give you a rubber band at the showers when you proved you were wet enough.  You couldn’t leave the locker room unless you had one.  So, we all did this thing where we would get undressed, wrap a towel around our waists, stand next to a running shower and cup our hands to splash ourselves with water.  I’ve never seen anyone actually get into the shower or remove the towel. No one ever got clean—that wasn’t the goal.  We did this to get the rubber band and get out of their and back to our normal school day.

It’s not that I don’t like exercise.  In the Army, we did physical training nearly every day.  But we never did team sports.

I have this inexplicable ability to get hit in the face with any ball I play with.  I’ve had basketballs bounced off my face.  I have been hit in the face with baseballs.  I even once hit a tennis ball with the corner of my racket and had it fly into my face.  I’m glad we never had bowling at school.

These accidents wouldn’t be so bad if I just laughed them off like other kids would, but I was an awkward teenager.  I never laughed anything off.  While others laughed at me, I just kept going like nothing had happened.

PE probably wouldn’t have been so bad if there were only boys in our class.  I embarrassed myself in front of everyone, but I started to get interested in girls at this age.  I would have liked it more if I could have humiliated myself only in front of the boys.

I can remember playing softball in PE.  I always went to my normal position from Little League – right field.  No one ever hits the ball there, and if they did, so one expected a super-human catch like you see in the major leagues.  So, you were mostly safe.  Once, the ball was hit straight to me.  I couldn’t even move to get it.  I was a slow fly ball that was destined for the exact spot I was standing in.  I put up my glove and the ball landed in it.  Now, this wasn’t my glove— it was a borrowed glove form the PE department, and the webbing was gone between the thumb and fingers.  So, the ball fell from my glove to the ground.  I quickly picked it up and threw it into the infield (anywhere in the infield—-just away from me!).  I looked over at a girl who I fancied—-her name as Jackie.  She looked at me with disgust and said “You ass!”  This was the longest conversation I ever had with her.  I looked at the ground and pretended I didn’t hear.  It was a better tactic than thinking about how a normal person would respond.

In school, the kids who were good at team sports were the most popular, even with the teachers.  It’s amazing to think about how much better they were treated than the kids who were good at academics (I wasn’t one of these either).  High School was worse than junior high, because the everyone was interested in how the school football team was doing.  To be on the football team meant you were one of the leaders. You were like a member of congress.  You could leave the school on a bus to some other school in North County for a game and no one would care that you missed class.

All through school, the teachers and parents make it a point of telling you that you need to attend school to get ready for the real world.  I’m having this own conversation with my kids now.  Well, I’m in the real world now, and there is no way I would ever go back there.

Thanksgiving is a strange holiday for me.  To me, it’s like a holiday that used to be really important, but then everyone in the world stopped celebrating it. 

Of course, it’s just as important as it was when I was a kid, but in England it doesn’t exist.  I just got back from my morning run (still sweating) and just realised that today is Thanksgiving.  To the world around me, it’s a day like any other.

When I first moved here, I told myself that I would hold tightly to my American childhood.  I would cook a turkey every Thanksgiving and have fireworks every fourth of July.  Hell, maybe I’ll even hang a big ol’ American flag in front of my house like I did when I was living in a small town in Missouri.  My house was going to be like an U.S. Embassy—US soil in a foreign land.  Well, the zeal wore off years ago.  Life keeps moving on and you have to move on with it.

But then, again, I suppose Thanksgiving doesn’t have a hold on me just because I was born in a land that celebrates it.  Increasingly, maybe because of age, I find myself less concerned with who I was and more concerned with who I am.  When I sit in meditation, for example, I try to focus on the current moment and leave the past where it belongs—as a construct of my own memory.  In a sense, the Eric Wroolie who I identify myself with—the American kid who likes baseball and fast-food—doesn’t really exist at all.  I have only what I have now.  Even the America I remember changes every time I go back—so I identify more with a memory than with the reality.  But I’m definitely not English—the accent always gets in the way.  In a way, the “nationality” of things is really unimportant.  Whoa, didn’t mean to try to get deep here—it must be the running high.

Well, anyway, happy Thanksgiving to all my family and friends back in the States.  Today for me will be a day like any other day, but I will occasionally stop and remember that today is actually a holiday and I will think about my family coming together back home.

I was terrible about doing homework when I was a kid.  It was always so much easier to think of the excuse I was going to use the next day than it was to turn off the TV and just do it.

I can remember too many occasions when the teacher would collect homework and try to name-and-shame me in front of the class.  “Where is your homework, Eric?”

“I didn’t do it,” I said while looking down at my desk and hoping the teacher would just move on to someone else.  I figured if I looked pitiful enough, he would leave me alone.

“Well, why didn’t you do it?” he would insist.  I could see his legs at the edge of my desk as he towered above me waiting for an answer.  He wasn’t going to accept that as my only answer. The whole class’ attention was on me.  I could feel my face getting hot with embarrassment, but hey, Knight Rider was worth it.

So, I gave the teacher the go-to answer for everything.  I give him the answer that I’m sure all teachers loathe—“I forgot.”

Towards the end of the school year, they usually gave up on me.  My parents tried everything to get me to do my homework, too.  But it was so easy to lie about how much homework I had.  Besides, I had a busy schedule starting with He-Man at 3:30 and ending with whatever prime time show was on that night before 9.

As I got older, the homework load got heavier and the likelihood of me doing it was much smaller.  My aversion to homework, along with my truancy habit, were the reasons I failed several classes in high school and went to Summer school ever year to make them up. My dad still talks about how he wasn’t sure whether I would graduate from high school at all.  I never even applied to any colleges.

I can remember my mom telling me that homework was a part of life and that I would get homework all the time when I grew up and went to work.  I didn’t really believe this.  Grown-ups don’t have any homework.

Now, I do have homework.  But here’s the big difference—the homework is not mandatory.  That really makes it difficult to do.

Now, I will sit down in the evenings with a big computer book read chapter after boring chapter of a subject which might not interest me in the slightest, but I need to know it.  I look at this homework the same way I look at running on a cold morning—there are hundreds of reasons not to do it, but one or two compelling reasons to do it.

Now, my job is to stay competitive and relevant in a market that is always moving.  Now I must stay ahead of technology that is always shifting.  Now, I sell the skills and knowledge that’s contained in between my ears.  My competition for work is not just in London, but in America, China, India, and the rest of the world.

So, I have to keep building that knowledge.  That means homework and studying.  What makes it easier is that not everyone does this.  To many people, if the boss doesn’t demand it, or if it can’t be a prominent bullet-point on the cv, it’s not worth learning.  The phrase I hear again and again is “The last thing I want to do when I get home from a long day at work is think about computers.”

But I’ve also worked with a lot of really good people who will browse the tech manuals on the trains or watch tutorial videos in the evenings to constantly educate themselves too.

I remember listening to a Brian Tracy tape years ago where he said (I’m paraphrasing), that you give eight hours to your employer and ever added hour goes to building you.

So, now I know the importance of homework and evening study.  Life would have been a lot easier if I learned it earlier.

I’ve always hated going to the gym.  It’s not that I don’t like working out—I just prefer something like running.  Running is easy.  It’s solitary.  You can listen to music and not have to worry about being watched or criticized or anything.

Most of my experience with gyms goes back to my time in the Army.  Every post I was stationed at had a gym that soldiers could freely use in addition to our mandatory physical training.  I would occasionally go for periods of up to a week of regularly gym usage.

photo credit: d_vdm

My memories of the gym are of bulky guys having lengthy conversations about their pecks, their lats, their gloots, whatever.  We shared the gym with soldiers from the infantry divisions.  As a linguist, it was a little unnerving (“Sure, they can kill a guy in a few seconds, but let’s see how quickly they can translate the People’s Daily.”). Just by standing in a gym, you were in danger of one these bulky, self-obsessed, guys tapping you on the should and saying “Spot me?”  So, not wanting to look like I didn’t know what I was doing, I would just grunt “Yeah, okay” and pray that the guys could actually bench press the amounts they were trying to lift.

I can remember working in one of the small controlled machines in the corner of the gym and listening to one guy spotting another on the bench press in the centre of the room—“Yeah Man!  You can do it!  Come on! Come On!  Yeah!  Yeah!”  My sarcasm made me want to mock them, but I wouldn’t dare.  However, if he had said “Eye of the Tiger, man!”, I would not have been able to control myself.

I pretty much stayed away from the gym after that.  I’ve run several 10ks, half-marathons, and marathons—but have stayed out of the gym.

As I get older, though, running is not enough to keep me fit.  I fear myself losing out to the obesity epidemic.  Either I have to exercise more or change my diet.  So, last week I joined the gym.

Joining the gym at 37 is not as easy as I thought it would be.  I wish I could have filled out an online form and just showed up at a time I thought it was empty.  Instead, I had to apply in person.  My big fear was that when I approached the reception desk at the local leisure centre and told them I wanted to join the gym, they would start laughing and say “I should think so!”  But, it was easy.

Once I filled in the paperwork, I had to book a meeting with a trainer to discuss my goals and set up a training plan.  I was nervous about this meeting.  I tried to think of a good answer to the question “So, what do you want to achieve by working out?”  I feel uncomfortable answering this question.  I don’t like bringing attention to areas of my body I’m unhappy with—especially to fit guy in his early twenties.  So my rehearsed answer was “You know, I want to do a little toning and work a little bit on upper body strength.”  But I really wanted to say “I want six-pack abs and I want people to gasp for the right reasons when I take my shirt off at the beach.” The answer I gave seemed to work and I am now set-up with a training plan.

The gym at the leisure centre is nothing like the gyms I used on Army bases.  So far, I’ve been going in the middle of the day and there seem to be mostly older people (older than myself) and no body builders.  I am now set-up with a direct-debit scheme that should keep me motivated to keep using it.  So far, so good.

Eye of the Tiger, man.  Eye of the Tiger!

I used to watch the tonight show every night. I missed a lot of school from oversleeping. At the NBC studios in Burbank, I saw Jay Leno a few times while he was guest hosting for Carson. When O’Brien took over for Letterman, I thought he was awful– but six months later, he had his own style and was funnier than Letterman.

I miss the late night TV while living in England. This week, Conan took over for Leno as host of the Tonight Show. This is the opening for the first show. Looks like it will be very good.

In the past week, two friends have posted new movies on YouTube.

Ted Falagan (that’s what the T. stands for) my childhood friend and writer/director has made another new film with his Fault Line players in San Diego called Killers and Casualties:

Having grown up with Ted, I have to admit that I’m just a tad bit jealous here.

Charles Nwokolo, a friend I worked with at BNP Paribas, posted this topical video on the state of fame:

I’m starting to think that maybe I’m wasting my time with all this . . . typing.

I can vividly remember the bus ride from St. Louis to Fort Leonard Wood Army base in Missouri. There must have been 50 people on that bus. We had only left St. Louis at around 8pm after a full day of travelling from Massachusetts. The bus was dark. We left the city and drove through blackness. I sat on an aisle seat half-way down the bus, but several other men (it felt strange to refer to ourselves as men) sat on the floor in the aisle. There was no radio and no one talked. All we could hear was the occasional cough and the sounds of the bus.

I was 18 and scared.

I realise now that all the other guys on the bus must have been scared too, but I felt like I was the only one to be realising the mistake he had made. They belonged here. I didn’t. I couldn’t see many of the other guys in the dark, but I assumed they were sleeping. How can they do that? Was this just another day for them? Did they have such good reasons for joining that this was actually the best option for them? Was there no doubt? Why didn’t they look scared? We were all going to become soldiers. I was going to be called Private Wroolie, and I hadn’t even gotten used to Mister Wroolie. I didn’t know if I would be handed a uniform upon leaving the bus or if they would make us go to bed first. When would the head shaving start? It was after mid-night. I should be sleeping, but I was too afraid. If only the bus would break down. Or if only someone would walk onto the bus and say “I’m from the Army. Thank you all for volunteering, but we don’t need anyone else. You can all go back home.”

But that was never going to happen. I had completely screwed up my life. I was sure of it. I volunteered, so I had no one to blame but myself. I was in for four years– and the bus ride alone felt like a month.

Only 24 hours earlier, I was saying goodbye to my girlfriend. She was just the latest girl I was seeing and I wasn’t sure how I felt about her. But in the four-hour ride, I had convinced myself that I should have asked her to marry me. Then, at least, I wouldn’t feel like I was throwing my previous life straight in the trash.

I wasn’t leaving much behind, but it felt like it at the time. As a teenager, my friends were the most important thing to me. But my family moved around a lot and the newest group of friends in the newest location hadn’t even known me a year. They liked me and made me feel like I fit in, but they would like someone else soon enough. Deep down, I could not imagine them sitting around the McDonald’s we all worked at saying, “If only Eric were here . . .”

I had finished high school a few months earlier. Most of the people I graduated with didn’t know who I was since I transferred into the school in November. But I had some really good friends who I could hang out with when I wasn’t working or at school. They all were going off to college– to University of Massachussets mostly. I wasn’t. A lot of the people working at the McDonald’s were still hanging around, but the smart ones were leaving. I had a problem with truancy which led to low grades and a lot of summer school back when I lived in San Diego. I didn’t think any college would take me. I didn’t even try. The only two options I saw at the time were continuing to work at McDonald’s– maybe sharing an apartment with someone one day– or joining one of the services. I had four armed services to chose from. The Air Force was for smart people (too smart for me, I thought), the Marines for hard-core fighters (Dad said “I didn’t raise my kids to be cannon fodder”), and there were so many Wroolies in the Navy that I didn’t want to be just another (and the uniform put me off too). So I decided on the Army.

When I first talked to the Army recruiter (“Come in, come in. Have a seat. Would you like anything to drink?”), I told him I wanted to be a police officer when I finished with the Army. He told me about the options available in security and military police. All these years later, I can’t imagine why I told him that’s what I wanted to do. I can’t ever remember seriously entertaining the idea of being a cop– before or since. My only real passion in school was journalism and writing for the high school newspaper. I think it just sounded good to say I wanted to be a police officer. He told me there was a language proficiency test he wanted me to take first. The Army really needed people good with languages and he had to put them all through the test. I told him I failed the only semester of French I took, but he still put me in for the test. It was called the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude and Battery) which gave you a fake language that you needed to listen to, analyze, and then answer a bunch of questions about what was said. I did well.

The recruiter told me I should become a linguist. He told me I could get extra profiency pay for having a language (but money was the furthest thing from my mind). He told me about DLI in Monterey, California, and how it was more like a college than a base. He told me how people learn about the culture and even dress in cultural clothing while learning. Honestly, I don’t know where he got that! I was big into James Bond books at the time (John Gardner, not Ian Flemming, I’m ashamed to say.) and while still insisting on being an MP told him I would consider being a Russian linguist. That would be pretty cool and exciting. He couldn’t guarantee me a language, but “with scores like these, you’ll have no trouble getting Russian.” Basic training is tough (“I’m not gonna lie to you”) but the rest should be easy. This was in March. I was signed up to enlist in October. I wanted the Summer before giving up my freedom, and I would only just finish High School in June.

In August, Iraq invaded Kuwait and soldiers started massing up in Saudi Arabia. There was talk of war. The first war since Vietnam, which led me to think about Oliver Stone movies and the Deer Hunter. I checked with the recruiter. Everything would be fine, he said. It was.

So after the Summer, which involved a lot of time in Springfield, MA and about six weeks back in San Diego, I reported to the recruitment office in The Federal Building in Springfield, Massachussets. I wasn’t sure if I should even be there. How does the shy kid become a soldier? It was October 9^th.

Late that evening, I watched the lights of Ft. Leonard Wood approaching the windows of the bus. We drove through the gates which looked like every other base I had ever been on with a guard post, a concrete sign, and a few flags. Turn after turn after tun, we arrived at a building. The bus door opened and a drill sargeant stepped on. The wide brimmed hat is very intimidating. But at that moment, it was downright scary. He was short but stocky and he had a little mustache that made him look even more sinister than he already was. He stood there for about 30 seconds in silence– just looking us over. Would it be possible to quit now? Would I dare?

If you spend time with me now, you would know that I don’t look anything like the picture on the side panel of this site anymore. That picture was taken two years ago– in the summer of 2006 while standing next to my brother on a beach in San Diego. My appearance has changed since then and people who knew me then don’t always recognize me in public.

Like a lot of people, I’m not comfortable with pictures of myself and rarely like how they look. So, I keep that one up until a better one comes along.

On the train the other day, I took a picture of myself to post on Facebook. Here’s a comparison of two pictures two years apart:

2006 Me	2008 Me

I’ve had a beard for about a year and a half now. The weight I put on is concerning (and I’m seriously trying to get rid of it). The gray in the beard is a surprise too. I wear my hair longer and, for now, I like it that way.

When I posted this picture on Facebook, one of my friends said “What have you done to yourself?” Well, that’s it.

When I find a picture I like for the side of this site, I’ll update it– but for now, 2006 Eric stays there.