By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Feb 21, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
Why I am nervous today.
Over the weekend I was venting to my wife about something annoying that had happened at work.
When I was finished I said, “But it’s all good.” And, as usual whenever I use that phrase, my wife didn’t respond.
And it occurred to me that I have never once heard Rebecca say, “It’s all good.” In fact, I have never heard any woman say, “It’s all good.” Only guys. And we say it a lot.
And that got me a little worried. And it’s why I am nervous today.
What do women know that we guys don’t know about why it’s really not “all good?” And why haven’t they said anything to us about it? Just like Rebecca did with me over the weekend, whenever a guy says “It’s all good” in the presence of a woman, she just remains silent.
I am going to find some woman today who looks like she knows the answer and ask her. And if your a guy, I suggest you do the same.
Something is up and we guys need to figure out what it is.
I would ask Rebecca but I am embarrassed that I don’t know why things really aren’t “all good” and don’t want her to know I don’t know. It’s a guy thing.
And, yes, I would also like to know without Rebecca knowing I know so next time when I am venting about work–or whatever–I can say “But it’s all good” and then add “except…” –adding whatever it is that I find out today from some smart woman why isn’t all good.
That will make me feel a little smarter around Rebecca. And reassure her that I am not just another clueless man who makes uninformed remarks.
Today’s article is courtesy of the queen of romantic planning, Sarah Pease, The Proposal Planner (TM). Whether she’s taking over the flight deck of the Intrepid for an epic proposal, or organizing the perfect picnic in Central Park, Sarah knows what’s what when it comes to making romance happen.
For some, Valentine’s Day is the most romantic day of the year filled with love, red roses and candlelit dinners. For others, it’s a commercialized, manufactured holiday rife with cheesy teddy bears, silk boxer shorts and exorbitantly priced prix fixe menus. Regardless of your opinion, it’s a great excuse for organizing a fun date with your loved one (even if it’s just your most-loved friend!). Here are five of my favorite ideas for Valentine’s Day:
1) For the Wallet-Conscious: Create your own wine tasting. With a little research done online or with your local wine shop, select 2 reds and 2 whites and pair them with cheeses or chocolates. Using a scarf from your closet, conduct an official blind tasting by candlelight. Not only will you expand your knowledge of wines, but you’ll also enjoy the flirty part of blindfolding each other! Budget not an issue? Hire a sommelier to do a private tasting!
2) Starry Night: Research the hours at your local planetarium or night-sky observatory and arrange to have a private tour. Whether you’re strapped into an IMAX seat watching the latest space-themed movie, or gazing at real stars in other galaxies, you’ll be in a romantic mood under all those stars.
3) Love is all Around: Plan an entire evening around love. Meet your sweetheart at the Museum of Sex near the Flatiron Building – who says a museum can’t be fun? Once you’ve explored all the newest exhibits, head to your favorite cocktail bar to sip on the cocktails she loves. From there, treat her to her guilty-pleasure food – is it cheesy biscuits from Red Lobster? Coconut Invasion cake from Asia de Cuba? Tonight is the night to indulge. End the evening by sharing three reasons why you love each other.
4) Futuristic Love: Want to know what the universe has in store for you? Do a psychic reading together! Make an appointment or stop in to see what the crystal ball or tarot cards say. If you really want to tempt fate, try a few different fortune tellers to see if their predictions overlap.
5) Ice Skating and Hot Chocolate: Strap on your skates and join the crowds for a lively spin around the ice rink. If you’re in New York, you can blend in with the tourists in Central Park, Rockefeller Center or Bryant Park, or discover some of the smaller rinks around the city. Reward all of your activity with a cab ride to City Bakery and test out the “drinkable chocolate” of the day. Got a sweet tooth? Plan to come back every other day for the rest of their Hot Chocolate Festival which runs the entire month of February. That way you can try a new flavor every night.
Many thanks to Sarah for sharing her fantastic ideas. For more info on Sarah, check out her website.
And now that you’ve got the best date ever planned, read here for what to wear.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Feb 5, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
My grandfather Brown’s favorite poem was “If” by Rudyard Kipling.
He memorized it and quoted from it often, especially when encouraging someone to seek wisdom and perspective in the midst of a difficult situation.
When I turned 13 my father gave me a framed copy of the poem for my birthday present. Like most boys on their 13th birthday, a framed copy of the poem “If” wasn’t what I was hoping for…. But I’m glad now I got it –and
I still have it. I hung it in my bedroom through high school and college and as an adult hung the poem in my office.
When my son was about 13, I gave it to him and it is now hanging in his bedroom. It’s a pretty good poem. With some excellent life advice:
IF you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master; If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jan 30, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
Why I love YouTube.
Not because it can capture funny home video clips, or humorous gags or sports highlight or memorable musical clips or an embarrassing public moment or a truly newsworthy current event.
Although I enjoy all of those things, too.
Rather, it is because from time to time, a rare gem of a video clip gets formatted to YouTube and shared with the world.
Like, for example, this 1963 interview with Peter O’Toole and Orson Wells discussing Hamlet that reveals the day-to-day personalities of both these extraordinary gentleman.
It’s not just educational; not just entertaining. It’s mesmerizing and magical in its own mundane way.
By Lauren Mayer, on Wed Jan 29, 2014 at 8:30 AM ET
Yes, folks, once again it’s time for a male politician to introduce us to an outlandish character, in the course of either sending indiscreet texts or making tone-deaf remarks about women. And for the record, I am NOT taking Mike Huckabee’s remarks out of context – I know he was saying that he believes Democrats are the ones ‘making women believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar providing them a prescription for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government.’ You know, because the Democrats’ real war on women is forcing us to make our own decisions and denying us mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds . . . ? (Not to mention an apparently confused idea of exactly what birth control pills do . . . )
At any rate, it was yet another example of why men of either party should stay away from sex – from talking about it, from texting about it, and certainly from making up middle-school-worthy aliases. Fortunately, I was raised by a feminist mother (which had some disadvantages – I was never allowed to have a Barbie because my mom disapproved of the unrealistic body image expectations generated by a doll whose real life measurements would be 39-21-33, who would be 6′ and weigh 100 lbs. . . . . . but I digress). Anyway, as an unpopular late-blooming geeky high school sophomore (whose real life measurements at the time were approximately 24-24-24), I came in for a fair amount of name-calling and teasing. One day I complained to my mother about the football captain in my physics class who constantly leered at me, “Hey, Mayer – your place or mine?” and made his buddies erupt in raucous laughter. (Remember, this was way before anyone had heard of ‘sexual harassment’ – it was only a couple of years after girls were finally allowed to wear pants at my school!) Mom suggested I try joking back (reminding me of the scene in A Tree Grows In Brooklyn where Francie is ostracized by the other girls at her first job until she laughs at something . . . like I said, I was a geek!) So the next day, when he re-used the same joke for the 47th time (and confirmed that he was a jock and no scholar-athlete), I retorted, “How about my place tonight and yours tomorrow, if you’re man enough?” His friends laughed, he turned beet red, and that was the end of the teasing. And I learned a valuable lesson!
In other words, Mike Huckabee just wrote my next song for me . . .
By Michael Steele, on Tue Jan 21, 2014 at 10:00 AM ET
When I think of Dr. King, I think of his courage, vision, strength, humanity, and most importantly, his perseverance. Dr. King’s perseverance transformed him into a legendary leader but it was his challenge to each one of us that sets him apart—a challenge in this day, in this hour, to “take up the cause of freedom”.
This element of Dr. King’s life is something that hopefully each of us has incorporated into our daily lives. Perseverance breeds success; and it is his perseverance that enabled Dr. King to achieve his dream.
Dr. King knew that his dream—this movement towards civil rights—would begin a new chapter for America—a chapter we are still writing today; a chapter steeped in the hopes of “little black boys and black girls [joining hands] with little white boys and white girls” for true opportunity and equality.
We celebrate this day different from any other American holiday because we use it not only to recall the legacy of the civil rights era and the man who lived and died for the true freedom of all Americans, but also to assess how we are doing in making The Dream real. Like Dr. King, we are not just writing a chapter in the life of the African-American community, we are the authors of the book of life in America.
I know that if Dr. King were here today he would encourage us to persevere in the face of tragedies like the Trayvon Martin shooting, or efforts to roll back hard fought gains in voting and civil rights. He would remind us that “freedom is not free” and the price we must pay keeps the dream alive; that success does not come without sacrifice if you want the dream to live for future generations
And that’s the easy part because the dream lives in each one of us. Happy Birthday Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jan 20, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
We’ve all heard some version of the story of a great basketball player who in some big game misses the clutch shot that could have won the game.
After that the player is forever haunted by that “moment” and asked over and over again by fans who recognize him, “Aren’t you the guy who ……?”
Over time the wound dissipates but never quite fully goes away.
My father wasn’t a basketball player (at least after high school). But as a former professional basketball team owner, he has had to live with a similar kind haunting basketball “moment.”
Call it the “Salina Bros Shakedown.” Call it the “Greatest sports negotiation of all time.” Call it the convergence of tenacity and blind, dumb luck. Whatever it was, it now has a final-seeming price tag of $800M.
And it’s $800M that, theoretically, my father—had my father been a different kind of person and a more ruthless kind of negotiator- may have gotten a piece of.
Yesterday I was with my dad when we ran into Joe Arnold who stopped him to do this interview. Joe does a masterful job of explaining succinctly what happened and capturing my father’s unbothered and good-humored attitude about it all.
I believe in negotiating hard and negotiating smart. Always. And my father has taught me that well. But he has also taught me to negotiate honorably with an eye toward your reputation and future business opportunities. At the end of each negotiation you have a “bottom line” business deal and a “bottom line” reflection on your character. And both are of equal importance.
In this particular negotiation there was a fluke in which had my father been focused merely on squeezing every last penny out of this deal at the expense of his reputation, he may have gotten a piece of this improbable windfall. But that would have meant sacrificing who he is and his reputation as a fair dealer with people who had trusted him and were relying on him to close the biggest deal of their lives. The entire ABA/NBA merger was being held up by the Salina brothers final demand for TV rights in perpetuity and they knew they had the NBA and ABA over a barrel and merely had to wait them out until they capitulated. And they did.
Is a person’s reputation worth $100M, $200M or even $400M dollars?
I guess the takeaway for me is that I believe that question is the wrong question. Because one’s reputation should never be for sale. Period.
And as so-called “missed opportunities” go–they should never be the cause for time-consuming and soul-draining bitterness but rather something you laugh off magnanimously and then keep moving ahead, from, lest you miss the next opportunity.
And that’s a pretty good lesson for a son to learn from his pop.
Is any of this just some sort of happy rationalization trying to pretend a missed opportunity wasn’t really wanted anyway? Probably a little. But only a little.
Because, at the end of the day, sometimes a missed shot in a basketball game, literal or figurative, is just that. And nothing more. And leaves behind an interesting story but not something to haunt or define you. After all, it’s just a game.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jan 8, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
One day, I am confident, I will come to understand the female species.
At least if reincarnation really exists.
Because doing so in this lifetime isn’t looking likely, even though I have felt at numerous times that I was on the cusp of “getting it.”
But these times that I believed I was on the verge of a breakthrough of complete comprehension of the distaff side turned out instead to be what psychologists call “a delusion.” And made me feel like a marathon runner who believes he just caught sight of the finish line but as he gets closer realizes it is just another starting line.
Which is probably just as well.
As much as underatanding the female psyche sounds like a desireble goal, it would take a lot of fun out of life. And be depressing to think that they were no more mysterious than my half of our species.
===
Great seques in spousal conversations.
Dec 21st 2013 10:30pm: “You have been in a mid-life crisis for a long time now, haven’t you? You think it will ever end or just keep dragging on and on?”
(Note: In case you weren’t sure, that question was posed by my wife to me, not the other way around.)
My response:
“I dunno. At some point it no longer makes sense to ever finish it.”
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Jan 1, 2014 at 12:00 PM ET
Passing down (and up) traditions and wisdom from generation to generation.
Sunday night my son was walking out to his car with a short sleeve shirt on and I yelled “Johnny, wait a minute. How are you going to stay warm?”
Johnny replied, “My car, Dad. It has heat.” “I know that,”
I said, “But what if you have a flat tire or your car breaks down? It would be a good idea to keep a jacket or blanket in your car, just in case. I know I am irrritating you with advice like this but my mom told me the same thing when I was walking out of the house at your age without any socks on in the middle of a snow storm.”
Johnny, looking at me not irritated but amused shot back, “Did you do it? Did you keep a blanket or jacket in your car after that?”
“No. No, I didn’t,” I said. “But it was still pretty good advice. You know?”
“Look, Dad,” Johnny responded, “You are forgetting you had two parents you got your genes from. Grandmommy, who constantly is giving advice; and Big John, who never takes any advice. And I have the same genes so it’s just a waste of both our time for you to keep trying to tell me what I should do. It may be a good idea. But you didnt do those things and neither will I.”
We both laughed and agreed that was the wisest advice passed between father and son in a long time.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Dec 31, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Thought for the day (Perception and problem solving)
When faced with a new and unpleasant predicament I like to think of the best part about it, the worst part, the slver lining and the reality of the entire situation.
For example, today I am congested and have a cold.
Best part: I can sound like Barry White when I talk to my wife.
Worst part: My wife keeps clear of me while I am contagious.
Silver lining: Sometimes I fully recover from my cold and am no longer contagious before my voice completely heals and I can sound like Lou Rawls for a couple of days when I talk to my wife. (Lou’s voice isn’t as deep as Barry’s was but still sounds low, slow, melodic and smooth.)
The reality of the entire situation: It’s too bad I can’t sing with or without a cold.
Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean I should take singing lessons instead of taking Advil. It only means I should at least seriously consider that option.
What do women know that we guys don’t know about why it’s really not “all good?” And why haven’t they said anything to us about it? Just like Rebecca did with me over the weekend, whenever a guy says “It’s all good” in the presence of a woman, she just remains silent.
