Because movies are usually half-price at most Japanese theaters on the first of every month, I was going to go see the latest Peter Jackson Hobbit movie today. Unfortunately I got sidetracked by both miserable weather and miserable tests to mark.

However, this got me thinking about evil and the things that have been the biggest, baddest most dangerous evils in my lifetime.

The devastating new drug that was unlike any other drug and so dangerous that just looking at it made an addict doomed to die in less than a year has been heroin, then cocaine, then crack cocaine, then “huffing” random substances from cans, then methamphetamine. Lots of time and money and news reports were spent on these evils but, eventually, a new evil was brought in to keep people scared and keep anti-drug money flowing to government to keep police employed and anti-drug ad money flowing to the media to keep anti-drug reporters employed.

I remember being offered meth on two different occasions back in university and was surprised to discover it had recently become the newest evilest thing. (For the record: I never tried it.) Now, however, with Breaking Bad finished and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s untimely death, it appears that heroin is destined to be cool and evil again.

However, this isn’t the evil that the Hobbit got me thinking about. When I was growing up, especially as I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church, the biggest evil was the game Dungeons & Dragons. Playing it, especially if we chose to be magic users/wizards, would make us yearn to commune with the Devil in order to gain special powers in our real lives.

It didn’t help that players could align their characters with different flavors of evil with Chaotic Evil being the most fun and Lawful Evil being the oxymoron. (Yes, you picky, picky geeks, I know what Lawful meant in the game. I know, so there.) If we played too much we would eventually lose touch with reality and begin to think we were our characters. A young Tom Hanks would then play us in Mazes and Monsters while Wendy Crewson played the lovestruck girl who pined for our lost sanity.

Of course, it didn’t seem very evil as Derek, Bobby, Shawn and I ate pizza and Doritos on lazy summer afternoons and pretty much figured out ways to get our characters into fights so that we could get stuff. (The more Bobby parlayed, the more likely the fight.) Magic was only useful for healing good guys and making bad guys blow up. The Magic User was usually the guy who ended up wreaking the most damage to his own party so we kept him at a distance.

In the end, I think we mostly turned out okay. At least I think I did.

Granted, in my real life I did develop the power of Resounding Voice and have learned to raise the dead. I think that has more to do with becoming a teacher than playing D&D, though.

I also still have lots of funny shaped dice hidden away somewhere. You could never have too many dice.

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.