Talk Hard!

This is going to be your holiday, every year, for as long as that child lives. If you are a typical first-time parent, you’re scared.  Further, you’re not sure what this is going to do to the rest of your life. It’s possible you will be an involved parent along with the child’s mother, but it’s also possible the child will be mainly raised by grandparents or someone else while both you and the mother grow up some more.

If you have the opportunity to get to know your child and you intend to be involved, I congratulate you on your interest and sense of responsibility. You aren’t alone. Consider that all around you there are hundreds of other first-time dads. Maybe they aren’t all the same age as you, but likely they’re just as scared or uncertain. Consider taking a class for fathers-to-be.  Talk to other men in your family and your community. Even if this pregnancy was an accident, don’t let shame about that keep you from reaching out to community resources to learn about what’s going to happen, to learn about babies and their development and how to be a part of it.

Good luck, all you young dads out there. Keep your chin up.  From what I hear, staying in this game is worth all the trouble.

Today is my day off. Well, it’s a day off for me, which means I still went to dance class because once you’re an adult who works at a desk it’s hard to keep in shape, and I have been cleaning the house a bit and filing papers, reading a book that’s background for an interview I’m doing in two weeks, but the rest of the day I have off to catch up on gardening and some work on one of the non-profit organizations I head, and relax and think. I even stopped by my mom’s house to be social with my parents and figure out what we’re doing tomorrow for Father’s Day. Nice to just hang out for a bit with them, with no big agenda. Don’t do that enough.

I’m a bit more of an over-achiever than most adults, but my point is, whether you’re a teen or an adult, you should value your time off and make the most of it. Most especially, you should appreciate it. When I was 15 I read 250 books a year in my spare time. Of course, I read all the time, even while walking to and from school, but now I look back on that wistfully, at all the time I had for purely recreational reading. And I think about how at the time I took it for granted.

These days, your average American spends 4-6 hours a day watching television and movies. I encourage you not to be average in this particular statistic. Spend less time passively absorbing things other people created and more time creating things yourself, whether those things are music, art, writing, new clothes, software programs, games, toys (cars and rockets count), clubs, good conversations, or even just your own self. I really mean that last one. That’s important. It takes work and creativity to create yourself, to figure out the particular ways you want to be in life, where you want to go, what you want to do, and who you want to do it with. Take time to get to know your friends, and take time by yourself to think and explore and get to know yourself.

Take time off, and really live that time. It’s one of the most valuable things you can do.

I got a case of poison ivy that combined with everything else I keep up with and squeezed out this blog for a while.  I left out poison ivy when I wrote that article about having sex outside, because I wrote the article at a time of year when poison ivy was still quiescent. It’s not anymore. Reddish stalks, leaves of three.  Watch out!

(I didn’t catch it from having sex.  I was purposefully removing it from my property, but I was insufficiently protected, partly because I’ve never reacted to it before.  Let this be a lesson to you! Wear Protection! Just because you’ve gotten away with something many times, that doesn’t mean you’ll get away with it this time.)

By Ed

Probably one of the most challenging times in a student’s life is high school, that transitional time where everyone argues that each choice you make will directly impact whether you get to go to a top-notch college or end up living in a dumpster.  Beyond the academic pressures of completing a public education, high school students planning to enter college have to take a bevy of extra tests, enroll in extra-curricular activities, and hold down external employment.  All in an effort to try to have the best possible image of yourself to put on college applications. But at the same time every high school student I’ve talked to is also trying to figure out what they want to do when they get into college.  Having been through the process, and having worked for a major university now for over eight years, I have a few tips to make the process a little less madhouse.

First, prior to your senior year in high school, probably the middle of your junior year, you should do a little looking online and read up on a handful of colleges you might like to attend.  Emphasis on schools you would like to attend; ignore advice from “helpful” people on this subject and ignore those magazine rankings.  Read up on the schools’ programs, look at pictures of each campus, see if any of them look and sound interesting.  In particular look at the sections on campus life, student activities, and the surrounding community.  You will be spending around ten to sixteen hours in classrooms per week, true, but you’ll be spending around sixty to eighty hours a week doing other things outside of class.  Read up on those too.

Second, if you find a few schools you really like, read up on a few broad majors that might catch your eye.  Ignore suggestions or demands you focus on “valuable” majors, whatever field of study you enter into is one you will have to enjoy doing for four years.  You might change majors, you might find you aren’t enjoying the field you started in, heck you might even not be that good at it.  I started in computer science and ended up in history, both because I loved history and because I was awful with computer programming.  But read up on a few fields that interest you and then email whomever the webpage lists as the “undergraduate advisor” or, lacking that, the director of the department.  Explain your interest in the program, that you are looking around, and ask what sorts of activities and classes the department looks for in potential students.  You will probably get a boilerplate answer but within that boilerplate might be some clues to things that will help you stand out a bit as an applicant.

Third, and finally, when it comes time to apply for college, spend a bit of time thinking about the essay you are going to write.  It does not need to be brilliant but it should speak to whatever passion made you want to go to that university.  Believe me, when reading those essays the admissions officer will be impressed with fine grammar, but even more impressed with an essay that actually sounds enthusiastic instead of blandly interested.  In any case though, good luck and don’t fret; most people who try to find a spot in college can make it in somewhere and the name on the diploma is not the key to success many people make it out to be.

Today ZenHabits has an article about dealing with money in a relationship that I recommend people read. I think these are good things to think about when talking about money with anyone, whether it’s your boyfriend or girlfriend, your best friends, your parents, or yourself. The important things include discussing priorities, being honest about what you’re spending and what you want to spend money on, and planning. Oh, and talking. Talking is important. Even talking to yourself (by way of making lists and reviewing what you’ve spent money on and what you want to get and how much it costs).

When you’re a teen these days you start to receive offers for credit cards in the mail. I recommend you accept one and start learning about how to manage money. If you take a part-time job so you actually have some money to play with, that’s even better. Having a credit card is useful for a few reasons. It’s convenient, the bill gives you a way of reviewing your expenditures that spending cash doesn’t offer (unless you keep receipts for everything), and using credit improves your credit rating if you do it responsibly, which will help you qualify for loans in the future.

The downsides are that you have to pay your credit card bill (at least the minimum payment) every month, on time, or you will get charged fees and your interest rate will go up. And you will get charged interest for any balance that you don’t pay off in full each month. Also, having a credit card can mean that you are able to spend more money than you have to spend, more than you can afford.

Most people would list that last as a positive aspect of credit cards, but really it’s a very dangerous thing. If you get in the habit of spending more money than you have, or than you’re going to have by the time the bill is due, then you may fall into the trap of maintaining credit card debt. Consumer debt is costing millions of people millions of dollars per year and making bank executives richer, all because people don’t learn to save and then buy instead of borrowing against money they don’t yet have. Then once you have debt it’s easy to just keep adding to it while ignoring how much it’s really costing you. In addition to the actual cost of fees and interest rates, there are the opportunity costs of what you could have been earning on that money if you had posted it in a savings account or CD and earned interest on it and then spent it, instead of spending it first and then paying that interest to somebody else.

In general, you want to stay aware of what you’re spending and whether or not the money you spend today will frustrate you by preventing you from buying something more important to you tomorrow. Don’t just spend what you have while you’ve got it, plan. Open a savings account and keep money there until you are ready to buy it, instead of keeping it as cash, which is easy to spend without thinking. And be careful about debit cards. Overdrawing a bank account can wrack up fees even faster than not paying a credit card off, sometimes.

After you have a credit card for a year, request an annual overview from your credit card company, which can probably categorize your expenses for you and send you a report. Look at your expenses and be honest with yourself. If you’ve bought things you wanted and are happy about, and paid your bills on time and in full, pat yourself on the back. If your interest rate has gone up, call the company and ask them if they’ll change it back down. Often they will. All it takes is talking.

Being aware of your spending habits will also put you in a better position to talk to other people about them. If your parents or your partner criticize your spending, you can respond from a position of knowledge. And that can make it less difficult to talk about it. People avoid talking about money for all kinds of reasons, but you shouldn’t feel ashamed about it - don’t feel ashamed about having it, needing it, spending it, or saving it. But do be aware of your own and others’ values having to do with it. Figure out what your values, habits, and priorities are, and talk about them to the people who are important to you. They might even be able to help you achieve your goals, if you talk about them.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports today that a middle school health teacher (*gasp*) answered student’s questions about homosexual sex, oral sex and masturbation. These topics are outside the core curriculum and a group of parents are so frustrated at being limited to administrative repercussions (the teacher has been put on paid leave pending investigation) that their representative in the Utah state house is introducing a bill that would enforce criminal penalties on teachers who deviate from state law governing sex education.

I look at this sort of thing and think this is why a teacher friend of mine warned me people would sue me if I wrote this blog. And here’s why I’m writing it anyway:

Thursday morning, students put up signs at the school supporting the teacher that read, “We were the ones asking her questions.” 

I believe students deserve answers in an educational setting, as well as outside of one. You deserve answers. Ask away.

Talk hard, students of Utah.