I think I’m a reasonably intelligent individual.  I’m also pretty mechanically inclined and have a better than average grasp of technology – I set up our home entertainment center and programmed a universal remote, for heaven’s sake.

That makes it all the more humiliating to admit that few things make me feel more dumb than buying a new phone.  Seriously, I walk into a phone store and feel like the aging Buick sedan amidst the Corvettes and Chargers.

It’s a perfect storm of insecurity-inducing elements:  You walk into a phone store and are greeted by a group of 20-something clerks who, no prejudice intended, are working for modest wages and may or may not have college degrees – certainly they are unlikely to be computer engineering graduates — but who have greater facility with phone technology than I ever will have.  Their first question is designed to make you feel stupid:  what are you looking for in a phone?

I don’t know, maybe one that I can use for calls.

I’m familiar with the concept of the smart phone, having owned a couple, but I seriously have no idea how to distinguish one from another other than by shape and color.   I’m not really an Apps guy and I have no words for expressing an actual phone preference.

Then they start demonstrating the products.  Fingers flash, bells and whistles go off, my eyes glaze over and my brain shuts down.  Give me the thin pretty one.

Data plans?  Again, I have no context for even asking what I think are intelligent questions about pricing.  I take their word for it.  Sure that sounds good – just get me out of here.

I currently have a hillbilly smile.  This past Sunday I bit into something soft (yes soft) and lost about half of a right top molar.  The gap is just next to my canine so is visible when I smile – discouraging me from doing so even more than usual.  I am really looking forward to the process of getting a crown.

Over the past several years I have been slowly redoing some fine dental work that was accomplished when I was a child.  While I have had no new cavities in the last two decades, I have had significant remodeling work done on existing fillings.

Somehow, even though my teeth have suffered no such decay as an adult, my childhood dentist managed to find cavities in pretty much all of my molars.  Now, 35 – 40 years later those old fillings are wearing out.  Some to the point of weakening my teeth (case in point, my broken molar).

I won’t name names for fear of libel (although I suspect Dr. Bischel is dead), but it seems to me that it could be pretty easy as a dentist in the late 60s or early 70s to “find” cavities in unsuspecting kids.  This was before the era of dental hygienists or routine x-rays.  We were simply taking the dentist’s word for it.  That would be a decent bit of extra income and once the drilling and filling is done, all the evidence is gone.

Or maybe my dental hygiene as a kid was just that bad . . .

What good is being immortal if you are not around to enjoy it?

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a traveling exhibition featuring the terracotta soldiers from the Chinese first empire.  In an effort to protect himself in the afterlife, the first emperor ordered the creation of thousands of clay soldiers and hundreds of clay horses to be positioned standing guard.  A few of these pieces are now on tour.  These clay sculptures from 2200 years ago are amazing in their variety and detail.

In a quest for immortality, the emperor (shortly after becoming so) ordered work to begin on an elaborate burial compound that apparently includes an underground palace, multiple chambers for entertainers, courtesans, and officials, and, of course a tomb.  Turns out, it’s pretty easy to get things done when you have hundreds of thousands of conscripts at your disposal (literally).

On learning all this, my first reaction was to reflect on how powerful a motivator immortality is and how the emperor, who lived to 49, swung and missed on that score – actually one story is that he died from mercury poisoning resulting from an elixir concocted to make him immortal – probably too ironic to be true.

In another way, the emperor did achieve a degree of immortality as, among other things, I now blog about him.  Too bad he won’t be able to read this post.

Laura and I had the genuine pleasure this past weekend of visiting with some of our favorite people:  Laura’s aunt Carol and uncle Roger; my uncle Bob.  Having lost all our parents at a relatively early stage in our lives, these folks are our last close link to that generation:  Carol and Roger are in their early 80’s; Bob is in his early 90’s.

Much has been written of this generation, calling them heroic for winning a war and toiling to build our modern world (both of which they helped do).  That ‘s not why these folks are my heroes.

Carol and Roger and Bob (and my aunt Mae who just recently passed away) are not heroic in the history book sort of way.  They are folks who married, raised families, worked jobs, and were members of churches, community groups, card clubs;  they fished, took car vacations, stayed in motels;  golfed, did needlepoint.  In sum, they lived (and still live) simple good lives without complaint, self-absorption, or knowing what the term self-actualization even means.

Sometimes we make things a bit too complicated. . . .