It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a great place to raise a child is a crappy place to be a teenager.

This gets worse and worse the smaller the town is and the longer you’ve lived there. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. Everyone has strong opinions about everyone else’s business. Everyone is easily dragged into everyone else’s business. If you are a geek, that fact is pretty much well known and that makes it hard to do the most basic step involved in dating (lie and/or make a good first impression). Everyone knows who you are and there’s not much you can do to break out of that.

In fact, it’s fair to say that living in a small town is only one step removed from being part of a crazy dysfunctional family not able to leave their own yard.

Even here in Japan, I’ve encountered such things. When I was teaching on the Sea of Japan coast, one of my schools served a small town that was almost literally squeezed between the beach and the highway. All students seemed to share one of a few family names and all of them also seemed to share years and years of bad blood.

One week, even though it was technically illegal for me to conduct a class by myself, I suddenly found myself solo-teaching while Mr. Oguma, my Japanese English teacher, was off doing something he hadn’t bothered to tell me about. The students pretty much considered it to be free time and I found myself getting slowly frustrated and then completely frustrated.

After a couple bad classes, I finally confronted Mr. Oguma about it and he very apologetically explained that he was having trouble organizing the girls in his homeroom into rooms for the class trip. It seemed that their families had hated each other since the girls were in kindergarten and that hatred had followed the girls into junior high school. Family A refused to let their daughter room with girls from families B and C while Family D didn’t want their daughter associating with Families A, B or C. Family E was right out. Mr. Oguma was in the middle of a tense negotiation to try to find an acceptable formula.

What still strikes me about this is Mr. Oguma is a former punk rock musician who is almost as tall as I am and has an intimidating physical presence. He actually aspires to work in troubled schools, including one where a student was killed during a bullying incident, and I’m sure if we dropped him in any troubled school in the USA, he’d thrive. He remains one of the best teachers I’ve worked with. Suddenly he was negotiating with teenage girls to get them to leave school for a few days and he was having a hard time.

He assured me he was making quicker progress than their 1st grade homeroom teacher had. It had taken him three weeks of negotiating to get the girls to room together for one night on a ski trip. When I asked why he didn’t just say “You have 10 minutes to get your name on this room list or you’re not going” he assured me it was impossible as the trip was part of the girl’s education and they had to go.

A year later, during the sports day events, one of the mothers involved would directly confront one of the girls involved and call her names in front of pretty much everyone. That girl stopped attending class, even though she still went to school. She simply studied in a room by herself.

The sad part is, having grown up in a small town, I kind of understand all this.

Today’s an odd one and, perhaps, a gross one, so let me apologize in advance.

Anyone who’s ever roomed with me or shared a train compartment with me or sat next to me when we were watching television knows that I’m not only a hard-core nail chewer, I’m a particularly noisy one as well and have a repertoire of slurps, smacks and squeaks that, oddly, do more to annoy than to entertain. One friend reportedly kept telling herself “He doesn’t know he’s doing it. He doesn’t know he’s doing it. He doesn’t know he’s doing it.” during a long train ride to keep from, well, she never actually said what she’d have done if I’d known I was doing it. (Which is not a very comforting thought now that I think about it.)

At least I was that way until December 3rd of last year.

Along with establishing what I hope is a good habit–posting here every day–I’ve also been working on getting rid of a couple bad habits (partly to give myself something to write about). Inspired by the stories of a couple students of Leo Babauta of the often useful and interesting, occasionally annoying and pompous website ZenHabits, I decided to focus on curing one of my longest running bad habits, gnawing my fingernails bloody.

This was not my first attempt. I’d tried everything from slapping my fingers when I caught myself chewing, to slathering bitter chemicals all over them to slowly poison myself and stop once and for all forever. Nothing worked–especially, thank goodness, the slow poisoning.

However, on December 3rd, for reasons I still can’t fully explain, I managed to make the new habit stick. I started practicing deliberate breaths whenever I caught myself engaging in autocannibalism. I’d inhale for five seconds, hold the breath for five, exhale all the air in five seconds (or so) and hold for five seconds; and then do that two more times.

Somehow it worked. It also let me be more aware of when I got that urge to gnaw, so to speak. (Not surprisingly, the internet, boredom and time-wasting were usually involved as much as stress.) I’ve slipped a couple times but not more than that. As near as I can tell, the deliberate breaths act as a kind of pause. Once I’ve got my own attention, so to speak, I can get back to work, or get back to being lazy without snacking on my eponychium. (Yeah, I looked it up. So what?)

I’m now approaching three months and want to move on to attempting to cure other bad habits. Next is, well, I’ll put that off for now and tell you about it another time, if I ever get around to it.

One of the guilty pleasures of having kids is that on occasion you get to mock them. This is especially true when you have a teenager in the house as teens are so thoroughly convinced of their own brilliance that it’s kind of fun to see them stumble a bit. (This also applies to adults who act like teens.)

Last week, while She Who Must Be Obeyed was out, my oldest, Sara, was assigned to cook ramen noodles for supper. She chopped the cabbage and ham and washed the bean sprouts and managed to fry it all up without burning down the house. She then set about to boil the noodles, which according to the instructions required four minutes of boiling time. Being better at math than her father (which, for the record, is true), she quickly deduced that three packages of noodles required 12 minutes of boiling time.

Being the dutiful father that I am, I ate all of what seemed like several pounds of mushy yet tasty noodles and encouraged her to be more careful in the future. I then went to my desk and started giggling a bit.

That said, I’m hardly in a position to judge.

When I was 15 or so, the most grown up thing I could legally do was ride my bike from our house in the Golden Meadows subdivision to a grocery store I vaguely remember being called the Hayden Mercantile.

I remember one occasion where mom told me she wanted me to go the store. I grabbed my bike and started racing down the hill, wind in my badly styled, bowl-cut looking hair. Right near the elementary school, mom’s car suddenly swept in front of me and halted my progress in a move straight out of a police drama.

She pointed out two fatal flaws in my plan. One: I didn’t actually have any money to buy the things she wanted me to buy. Two: I didn’t actually know what she wanted me to buy.

If I remember correctly, I received money and instructions and bought all the required goods and delivered them as instructed. It wasn’t as much fun as it should have been, though, as mom had also pointed out something along the lines of the entire point of sending me was that she wouldn’t have to drive, which my haste had kind of required.

Even my teenage brain could understand that. But then again, as a teen, I already knew everything.

(Luckily for this blog, I’m sure I have a few more moments of brilliance like that hiding somewhere in the back of my head.)

Although in the past few years I’ve managed to achieve some exceedingly minor success in one sport, my athletic career and athletic abilities have always been very dodgy. This is the progeny of a lethal combination of tall, skinny, slight swayback, lack of patience and disproportionately large feet.

Oh, and there’s that lack of natural talent thing.

As a result of all that, I was not only the last person picked for any team, but there was usually some serious wheeling and dealing about who had to take me. “You take Spaceman.””No, you take him.” “Okay, we’ll take Spaceman but you have to take all our girls and give us Matt.” “You can have Danny or Wayne, but we’re keeping Matt.” Etcetera.

(NB: I went through a number of nicknames while I was growing up: Spaceman, because I like science fiction; Livery, because some semi-literate moron misread my name over the intercom when I won a free book from the library; and Deadly, because my name is Lively. Only in a small town could that latter name be an insult and a sign of weakness.)

On one occasion we were playing “Some Form of Football” (not its real name). Because there was a lack of violence and fear involved, it must have been during physical education class. As a rule, I was usually in the part of the field where little action was taking place or, more specifically, the action usually avoided my part of the field.

However, on that day, the play swung toward me. A pass was thrown and either the intended receiver or the defender tipped it but couldn’t control it and it deflected toward me. I stepped forward, caught the ball a couple feet off the ground and ran into the end zone.

I was really happy in my moment of triumph and success but I was the only one celebrating. My exhortations that “I scored. I scored.” were met by puzzled looks as everyone tried to remember whose team I was on.

I finally convinced Joel Williams, my team’s captain, that I was on his team and suitable congratulations and praise were delivered. I didn’t score again, probably ever, but knowing me I talked about that score for a quite a while.

My sports career didn’t improve much after that. I ran track in junior high school. At one point I was almost an average miler. I also played basketball in junior high school and for a year in high school. I never mastered the lay up. The more open I was, the worse it got. I eventually gave up being a player to become the junior varsity manager.

That I have a letterman’s jacket with a letter is one of the greatest jokes I’ve ever been able to pull off.

Inspired by an old friend of mine–Steve Brisendine–and in desperate need of a more consistent writing habit, I’ve decided to 1) finally get a website with my name on it and 2) write something on it everyday for a year.

I’ve always been dubious of the notion of blogging as it starts with a loud and throaty “Look at me!” followed by “This is IMPORTANT STUFF and STUFF LIKE THAT!” (something like that) and that’s typically followed by “Why is no one reading me?” and hours spent studying site analytics and tinkering with SEO tricks. (A friend of mine assures me that “Britney Spears” and “thong” are useful keywords to include for SEO, although that was many years ago.)

It also assumes that I have enough to say. Unfortunately, I typically have no problems talking and talking and talking about things–and no problems swearing (you have been warned)–which has led to a number of problems I’ll probably write about some day. Writing about stuff, though, that’s different. And a bit more permanent.

What’s got my attention now are odd coincidences. A while back, a colleague of mine who is a vocal fundamentalist atheist, made a snarky comment about Mormons–I work at a company that was once owned by Japanese Mormons–and this made me think of the Mormon family that used to live across the street from me in Hayden, Colorado. That made me think of the sisters who used to live farther up the street and who used to go to church and Sunday school with me at the First Baptist Church in Hayden.

Although I had a crush on both of them at one time or another, and they had stayed at our house in Kansas for a night as they were moving across country, I couldn’t remember their names. I could only remember an incident involving a country song. The Sunday school teacher, who’s name I also don’t remember, was explaining the evils of popular music and was using, as his text, sort of, a country song about a woman getting drunk on tequila and waking up next to a man “presumably after having having slept with him” (well, duh, but he meant “slept with him” as in “knew him in a Biblical way you’re not supposed to say in church.”) although he may have actually said “after having had sex with him” with the fourth word half-whispered, half-choked on.

He couldn’t remember the name of the tequila and neither could I, a fact which, me being 16 and not fully in control of my wits–still waiting for that to happen, by the way–I announced with a repeated “Yeah, what is that?” The youngest of the two sisters looked at me and mouthed “Jose Cuervo“. I started nodding and stifling laughter and fell madly in love again, at least for a while, with her.

That scene, by the way, pretty much explains all you need to know about my religious upbringing.

Well, there was also the swing your Bible like it’s a sword until your arm gets tired so you can see how hard soldiers had to work to kill people back in the day moment, and the young man calling Vietnam veterans babies for complaining about the conflict, and the aftermath of a  scandal that pretty much drove me away from churches, but those are stories for another day.

First, there are those odd coincidences:

I kept trying to remember the sister’s names, and although I could pretty much picture them as they were, I couldn’t remember anything else about them. Then, a couple nights ago, I was chatting with my sister about an old acquaintance from Hayden who’d just died. That led to a rush of memories and she suddenly mentioned the names of those sisters and their last names and I finally could put names and faces together. (I didn’t remember there was a third sister, though, and wish to apologize to her profusely.)

That’s led to a rush of other memories and several bouts of “At the time, it seemed like a good idea” and “In God’s name and under the stars what for?” embarrassment, which in the final colossal coincidence, is basically the theme of the song being discussed in Sunday school that day.  The difference is I remember shooting out the lights and starting fights, so to speak. There were also, oddly enough, a couple kissed cowboys.