Micron

Today, I unlocked a brand-new transportation method for getting around as I trek across the globe. While exploring the world by air, land, and sea, I can now add “motorcycle” to my list of options.There are a lot of ways I’ve explored new territory over the years: car, truck, canoe, kayak, hang glider, hot air balloon, small diving boat, enormous cruise ship, giant airplane, small bush plane, train, electric scooter… in addition to the obvious ones like bicycles, roller skates, skateboards, and snowboards.But I’ve never really cared about motorcycles at all until very recently. I was never enamored with them in the past, mainly because it seemed like riding them was so much work, and they seemed so incredibly dangerous.So, that’s why I signed up to take a safety course when I decided to give motorcycles a try, even though that’s not required in my state (Arizona). I wanted to start out on this new journey with as much safety and training as possible.What’s funny, though, is how, when I signed up for the course and took the test, my wife was completely mystified and almost angry.“You signed up for WHAT? A motorcycle class? I’ve known you for two decades, and you have never—even once—mentioned wanting to ride a motorcycle… ever!”I actually find this line of thinking to be quite funny. I have all kinds of interests that I don’t talk about with anyone… but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.I’ve never understood people who tell others what their plans are or those who make all their thoughts and interests known to everybody. I’m a thinker, a researcher, a “finder-outer” who just slowly, carefully feels his way through life, quietly wondering about possibilities and asking: “What if?”I almost never announce anything to anyone about anything I do until it’s done.If I’m going to do something, I’ll keep it to myself unless and until I decide it’s the right thing to do, and then I’ll go do it. Only then will it be time to tell others about it—after the fact.This way of going through life has saved me from a lot of embarrassment over the years.I’ve known so many people who make these big, grand announcements to everyone they know about all the things they’re going to do… but they end up not doing them, either because they had no business making such a claim in the first place, or because circumstances outside their control made it impossible.So why create embarrassment for yourself by telling everybody something you don’t know is going to happen for sure? I guess I’m naturally like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, where he says: “Never let anyone know what you’re thinking.”There’s really only one exception here, and that’s with my immediate family: my wife and kids. If something big and important affects them, I’ll tell them.In this case, I did feel it could affect them if I started riding a motorcycle, so I told my wife… after I signed up for the course.She was so completely astonished; she couldn’t even believe it. I think she thought I was kidding. But no. I don’t kid.If I were to take my wife’s question seriously (and while I am being lighthearted here, I did take her seriously and I did give her a solid answer), I still don’t know exactly why I want to start riding motorcycles.I think it comes down to two specific reasons:First, it’s mostly because I am, unapologetically, having a mid-life crisis. I yearn for new and interesting things to do and new ways to experience life while it’s not too late.Second, it’s also because buying a convertible Mustang last year really opened my eyes to being out on the open road. I mean, really, out on the open road.There’s a world of difference between sitting in the air-conditioned cab of a family sedan with soundproofing and nice, gentle music playing in the background as you politely leave one location and arrive at your destination.But my attitude these days is mostly: FORGET THAT!Gimme the top down, man! I want the wind blowing through my hair (or what’s left of it) and sunburn on my skin. I want to feel the rumble of my rickety suspension on the potholes, hear the loud road noise, and smell the dirt on the hills as I pass by them.I like driving my Mustang with the top down (I prefer “topless,” as I like to say to my wife), where I can hear my own engine purring. It’s a totally different experience that way when you’re connected to the world around you rather than isolated in a nice, sterile chamber on wheels.Driving with the open sky above me, I can smell the scent of wet pavement when it rains and the diesel fuel of trucks as they drive past me. I can also feel the fluctuation in the air temperature when I hit thermals and cool spots, and the hairs on my forearm respond as I sail down the road with my arm out the window.I want more of that.I want an unobstructed view of the world I’m exploring. Once I actually got a taste of what was going on above, under, and around my four-wheeled pony, it only gave me an appetite for taking in more of it.Do you know what your car sounds like? I know the metallic rattle my engine makes when I hit exactly 50 MPH on that one specific bend in the road when I’m in fourth gear as I drive home. I also know that when I rev it up a bit, that annoying rattle goes away once I hit exactly 54 MPH.How could I ever know this in a Honda Civic with my little piano music playing on my iPod and the air conditioner chugging away, trying to keep me cool?I can’t. It just doesn’t work that way. I like being attuned to those little environmental factors that are always there whether we realize them or not.And for whatever reason, the closer I get to turning 40, the more I crave those raw, visceral sounds and feelings of life. I don’t mind my face turning red because I forgot to put on sunscreen while driving up and down the s-curves of Mount Lemmon. Who cares?I got to feel the air change and become drastically cooler as I climbed from 2,000 to 7,000 feet in elevation while hearing the birds sing, smelling the oil spills on the road, and feeling the tingle of those UV rays pounding down on my neck as I raced away from the sun while it set!That makes me feel alive… and I am really in the mood to feel alive right now.I think that’s why I want to ride the simplest, purest mode of mechanized transportation out there. I want to take it all in. Bring on the two-wheeled cruisers!So, as of today, I’m all done with my safety course, and my license is good until I’m 65. The overall experience of learning to ride a motorcycle was very interesting… and I have to say, it was harder than I expected.I don’t mean that in the way most people mean it when they say, “It was harder than I expected.” I’m constantly surprised when people say that because it tells me they’re really bad at understanding or predicting how hard things are.A few of my kids are like this: God love ‘em, but they’re regularly shocked when they try new things and it turns out to be difficult. One of my sons was nearly histrionic due to his inability to ride a bicycle. Apparently, he thought he’d just hop on it for the very first time and ride off into the sunset. I was sad for him, but I also thought it was kind of hilarious: why would he think that balancing on two wheels while moving forward—something he’d never done before in his life—would be so simple?In the case of learning to ride a motorcycle, I was a bit surprised by what, exactly, turned out to be so challenging.Riding a motorcycle on a road filled with cars presents you with tremendous threats that are constantly changing, for example. You are always in danger, if not due to your own mistakes in speed and maneuvering, then due to the actions of others on the road.I won’t even bore you here with listing the unbelievable number of things you need to be observing, anticipating, thinking about, and preparing for while riding down the road on a bike… but I will share a few things I learned in this course that were very interesting.It was way harder than I expected.Okay, that’s not actually true. Like I said, I expected it to be hard. But the riding part was more challenging than I was prepared for in a few ways.I was totally prepared to do a very bad job and forget lots of things or do them the wrong way, over and over until I eventually got them right. And that is exactly what happened, but some of the things I thought would be hard weren’t. Some of the things that turned out to be hard were things I didn’t even know about at all before I started.Shifting was really tricky.In general, I’m not afraid of shifting. I’ve driven a car with a manual transmission for most of my life: I have always preferred a manual gearbox, in fact.In a car, though, you have a stick shift in your center console with numbers on it, and you can literally just look down at it and immediately know what gear you’re in. But as I learned today, shifting on a manual motorcycle is totally different. At least on the bike I used (a Suzuki TU250X), I had to stomp down on a peg on the left side of the bike to shift down and pull the peg up with my toe to shift up. How do you know which gear you’re in? You don’t! It doesn’t tell you.You simply have to remember the whole time what gear you’re in, and if you forget, you have to start over by putting it in neutral and trying to match the speed with the gear you want. That’s not necessarily a disaster waiting to happen, but it is a heck of a lot harder than a simple car shifter.The bike was really finicky.Putting my bike into neutral was nearly impossible: you have to just barely pull up slightly with your left toe until a green light comes on.But if you go too far, it upshifts. That was maddening. Many, many times, I tried to put it into neutral and accidentally put it into second or third gear.If I had more time to learn this bike, I might get used to it eventually, but during my rider course, I never did.I stalled a few times, which was embarrassing.Trying to figure out just how much play there was in the “friction zone” of the clut

Today is my 19th anniversary! Hooray! To celebrate, let’s play a quick round of trivia.What do you call your 25th wedding anniversary?The correct answer is your “silver anniversary!” (“Silver jubilee” would also be an acceptable answer.) Everybody guessed that one, right? It’s pretty simple. Okay, how about an even easier one?What do you call your 50th wedding anniversary?Your “golden anniversary.” Everybody knew that, too, right? All right, let’s try a harder question.What do you call your 20th wedding anniversary?Uhh, believe it or not, it’s supposedly called a “China anniversary.” Strange, huh? Okay, now, for the final round—and this one is really going to stretch the boundaries of your knowledge—here we go:What do you call your 19th wedding anniversary?The answer is: nothing. Not a thing.Last week, as I was preparing to celebrate our big day coming up on October 1st, I was surprised to discover that my being married to, caring for, and living with the same woman for nineteen years means absolutely nothing… and it isn’t even worth celebrating.Okay, of course, I don’t literally mean that it means nothing and that it’s not worth celebrating.But I am saying that, according to folklore on the internet, when I did extensive searching online last week to find out what magical milestone my 19th anniversary would have, I came up totally blank.In fact, believe it or not, those special kinds of dates stopped being counted at the 15-year mark—four years ago.That’s right: today, this special day after nineteen years of marriage, has no traditional name, theme, or gift.You may be shocked (as I was) to find out that during our first decade of marriage, without even knowing it, my wife and I breezed right past a bizarre list of special anniversaries we didn’t even know about: paper, cotton, leather, fruit, wood, sugar, copper, bronze, willow, and tin.Yep, those are, in order, the special anniversaries of your first ten years together. After those, we also weren’t aware that we passed our steel, silk, lace, ivory, and crystal anniversaries.Somehow, in the midst of our first decade and a half of living and loving, flirting, and fighting, we passed our fifteen-year mark right when… our culture stopped caring.Apparently, society has deemed the first fifteen years of marriage worthy of being called out separately and giving each year, individually, its own name, with specific gifts already pre-planned to make it that much easier for everybody to bless you with. But then, I guess, they get just bored and give up altogether.As far as I can recall, nobody has ever given my wife and me a gift of paper (that’s kind of cheap), leather (that’s creepy), sugar (that’s weird), or willow (what?) for an anniversary gift, and I’m okay with admitting that this doesn’t bother me at all.But how strange it is that just when we were getting to the really hard part of living together, deep in the trenches of parenting, when our lives were peaking in their level of unimaginable difficulty, right at the moment our marriage became old enough to get its driver’s license, people stop counting and it isn’t special anymore.That’s weird.Surely, I thought, there must be some kind of nickname or gift or theme for a 19th anniversary. Why wouldn’t there be? But no, after searching high and low, it’s a big fat zero.I felt like I was at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, asking for something I apparently don’t deserve, and now Mr. Wonka is shouting at me.“You get nothing! You lose! Good day, sir!”Wondering how this could be, I went to Grok, my favorite AI tool, and asked for a suggestion in the absence of an “official” version. Do you know what Grok suggested?Tinfoil.Huh? This is my tinfoil anniversary?Grok’s response:“For the 19th anniversary, which doesn't have a widely recognized traditional or modern gift, let's invent something that captures the awkwardness and in-between-ness of being one year shy of two decades: a custom-made sculpture or art piece crafted from tinfoil.Why tinfoil? It's cheap, shiny, and somewhat awkward to work with, much like being 19 – you're not quite there yet, but you're trying to shine.”That’s weird.The more I thought about it, the more I realized how weird this whole thing really is. Not just suggesting foil as the element that best personifies nearly two decades of togetherness, but how the very essence of celebrating nearly two decades of togetherness is in and of itself kind of strange.For starters, 19 is such a weird number to begin with.In a way, I think it’s impressive to be able to say that I’ve been married for 19 years. When I was able to say, “I’ve been married for a decade,” that seemed like forever. And 19 years is almost double that. But, as Grok mentions, it’s not quite double.19 as a number is more notable for what it’s not than for what it is. It’s like the Apollo 13 mission getting almost all the way to the moon, but not quite. What happened with Apollo 12 and 14? You probably can’t even remember, but you’ll never forget Apollo 13.Or, perhaps it’s like the Apostle Paul describing to the Corinthians how he had received “forty lashes minus one” five times in the first century. Turns out, the ancients decided that forty lashes of the whip were enough to kill a man, so if they only wanted to punish (or torture) him, they figured: “Let’s get as close as we possibly can to killing him, but stop one lash short so he doesn’t actually die.”Okay, I’m being overly dramatic. But still…My wife and I both agree that the 19th anniversary is a strange one. The number is so awkward: when we hit eighteen years, that seemed like passing a huge milestone. It’s like your 18th birthday when you “become an adult.” Everybody claps and cheers for that. Later, turning twenty seems like a big deal because it’s a full two decades.But 19? That just feels and sounds funny, plus it’s an odd number and a prime number.Our anniversary this year also feels funny because we live in Arizona. On our wedding day, in Colorado, the weather was quite pleasant, and there was an autumnal chill in the air.In fact, when we returned from our honeymoon one week later, there was snow on the ground. I had to scrape ice off our car’s windshield in the airport parking lot, and since I didn’t have a scraper, I had to use a credit card.But that was in the Rocky Mountains. Here, in the Sonoran Desert, even as I write this, it’s still hovering in the triple digits. Just this past weekend, I was sweating buckets when it reached 105ºF on Saturday.…and that was a full week after the official start of autumn.That’s weird.Fun fact: nineteen is the age my wife was when we were married nineteen years ago. She was almost twenty, but not quite (just like our marriage now). Barely older than her myself, I was twenty on our wedding day.At some point earlier this year, we did the math and realized that we’ve finally surpassed the calendar date where we now have known each other longer than we have not known each other.We still have yet to pass the mark of living more days as married people than as single people, but that is coming very soon.So, now I’ve known Rachel longer than I have not known her, and the same goes in reverse.That’s weird.Perhaps the strangest thing of all of this is thinking about how next year is going to be the most monumental year of our lives thus far. Lord willing, if we all survive until then and if my wife and I can keep the flame of passion burning, in 2025, we will celebrate:* Our 20th anniversary* My 40th birthday* Her 40th birthday* Our two oldest children graduating from high school* Our youngest child turning 13That’s a lot of milestones. It also means all five of our kids will be teenagers, and we’re inching ever closer to being empty-nesters at the spry age of 48.That’s weird.The icing on this cake of weirdness—and what seemed to be a very bad omen—came on Friday night: I lost my wedding ring. That’s never happened to me before.For nineteen years, as far as I can recall, I’ve worn my wedding ring every single day. Oh, sure, there’s been a time or two when I forgot about it after taking a shower and left the house without it… but later, I’d put it back on when I returned home. So, I don’t recall ever really “losing” it.I’m super obsessive about that, and there’s a reason why.Right after we were married, maybe in the first month or two, I was fidgeting with my new ring at the office where I worked. It was so new it still felt awkward on my skin, and I constantly fiddled with it, wiggling it up and down my finger.My dad (who worked with me) gave me a mild scolding: “You should never take your ring off.”“Oh, it’s no big deal. I do it all the time,” I replied. He had some thoughts about that.“Well, you’re just doing that now because you’re young. Wait until you’re older, and you’ll eventually leave it on forever. I never take mine off. Ever. I sleep with it on, swim with it on, shower with it on… it never leaves my finger. It will be the same for you, you’ll see. You’ll get used to it, and you’ll never take it off again.”This made me upset because he was making fun of me for being young and inexperienced (which is not my fault, and I hate it when older adults are condescending like that). But I was also annoyed because he was telling me that I would change my habits to be more like him in the future and that this was inevitable.Well, guess what? I take my ring off all the time. I take it off every single night. I set it on the nightstand next to our bed before falling asleep. I literally can’t sleep with it on. It bothers me too much. When I wake up, I put it back on.I always have. I still do. I never stopped.Unlike my dad, I take my ring off when I go to the gym, when I swim, and when I shower. I’m constantly taking it off and putting it back on multiple times a day, and that’s never been a problem.And I was doing fine until I reached the nineteen-year mark, when, for the first time ever, I finally lost track of it. That’s right: just a few days be

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