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coffee stain left by someone else, a layover here in Cincinnati, looking out over my laptop to a bank of windows that take in a snow swept runway the same color as the dirty white sky?

These days are long gone, but there was probably a time when someone could take you to the airport or meet you at the airport and have a meal or drinks with you there. Haven’t seen you in a while, we ought to get together. Sure, but when? Hey, I know – I have to fly on Thursday, meet me for breakfast at the airport and we’ll catch up. No more, no more.

I’m well armed, I have three books, work, plenty to write, DVDs. I have inspiration, too. Earlier this week I was teasing my EoT colleagues. I told them my piece on Marlowe would be so good they’d want to quit writing in despair at the comparison of their copy to mine. Facetious, of course. But then I turn around and Richard Condon does the same thing to me with 1959’s The Manchurian Candidate. You probably know the movie but, gawd, the book! What story but, more important, what prose! What dialogue!

“I have to be a fraud,” she said, slipping several lengths of steel into her voice like whalebone into a corset.

The part that made me want to cry was his description of New York, “rich in facades not unlike the possibilities of a fairy princess with syphilis,” “patrolled by strange looking pedestrians, people who had grabbed the wrong face in the dark when someone had shouted ‘Fire!’ and were now out roaming the streets, desperate to find their own.”

All together, the avenues and streets proved by their decay that the time of the city was long past, if it had ever existed, and the tall buildings, end upon end upon end, were so many extended fingers beckoning the Bomb.

My final destination is New York, by the way. Thank God it’s not Condon’s. But anyway which is the lonelier, the businessman or the writer? The suit coat-clad Ulysses or the troubador that hears a Master sing?

Will my kids listen to Uncle Sam?

Today is one of those days where you woke up and expected things to go smoothly and happily only to find yourself yelling at your kids and losing your temper.

It’s also a business travel day for me which makes the outburst I threw down on my two oldest kids today even harder to deal with. As other business travelers with families know, you want to walk out that door on a high note with your family smiling and waving a hearty goodbye until you come back home in a few days.

Instead, my kids are probably glad “that yelling guy” won’t be around for a few days.

Perhaps the toughest job a parent has is trying to correct their children without sounding like a complete raving lunatic. As someone who has been more of the lunatic vs. the Ward Cleaver type father the past few weeks, I have to say I am tired of the kids whining. My smack down this morning was me pressing the nuclear button on weeks of whining and bickering between my 12-year old and 9-year old. My fellow EOT blogger – and misguided Patriots fan – Don Martelli recently posted on communicating with your kids. It’s good advice and something we should all take to heart.

Central to the issue: a 12-year old daughter who is rapidly approaching the “know-it-all” teenage years and a 9-year old son who is over sensitive about what his sister says to him. This creates a vicious circle of one bossing around the other and the other feeling all emotional about it.

All of this incessant whining is driving me and my wife absolutely bonkers. We’re at our wit’s end.

Are we to blame?

You bet your ass!

As much as I think always that we’re “strict” parents in relation to others we encounter through the kids school, church, youth sports – the bottom line is we need to do more to give our kids more responsibility. Our kids are fit and active but this “softness” in mentality is what is contributing to our kids being fatter and lazier than ever.

At the end of the day, this all comes back to effective parenting. Parents need to stop whining and raise their kids to be responsible young people. This means telling your kids “no” and means not trying to make their lives all shits and giggles. Life is not easy and life isn’t always fun. If we try and protect our kids too much, we do them harm. If we protect them too little, we put them in harm’s way.

The key word here is balance. My wife and I struggle with this balance from time to time. I am sure all parents do.

We need to teach our kids to have, what my good friend calls, the “victor” mentality, not a “victim” mentality. In today’s popular culture our kids are surrounded by the victim mentality. It’s up to us parents to teach them not to whine but to take control of their actions and reactions. This life lesson is vital to their future successes and failures. They learn equally – perhaps more – from failures.

My failure as a father this morning – the yelling, ranting and raving over breakfast – was another way for me to teach them not how to react to stress and difficult situations. I’ll have to wait until my trip is over to sit them down and own up to it. But I will do it and I think they’ll be better kids, and I a better father because of it.

Let’s just all stop the whining.

Follow Scott on Twitter @prgully or email him at scott@everyotherthursday.com. His personal blog, where he writes about public relations and social media, is www.scottgulbransen.com. Just don’t complain about his posts or he’ll cap your ass.

The U.S. - stuff's starting to break

There’s just one problem: when I travel about my home town of Boston and around the country these days, I get the distinct impression that I’m not exactly living in the first world anymore. I’m starting to feel that the days of “bigger, better, faster” are behind us — that, in a thousand, small ways, we’re slipping from that “first world” status and becoming something else. What it is, I don’t know. It all strikes me as “third worldish,” but that’s the perspective of someone who hasn’t really spent any time in the actual third world. Maybe its more of an ersatz first world? All the pieces are there: the airports and highways and rail lines. The Internet. It’s just that they’re old and decaying from lack of investment, or poorly integrated because the country hasn’t really thought creatively about issues like mass transit and public infrastructure for the last sixty years. Or, like the Internet, they’re locked behind pay walls because a decision has been made that allowing a few companies to make money off the service is better for society than making that service ubiquitious and affordable — like clean water or electricity.

The reality comes at you from a thousand directions:

• Its the five or ten delay notifications that get sent to my mobile phone by Boston’s MBTA every day notifying me of equipment problems or delays on the Red Line and Boston to Fitchburg train line – the two main routes I use to get to my job.
• It’s sitting in Boston’s South Station or New York City’s Pennsylvania Station this week — major transit hubs in the middle of two of the nation’s most important economic centers — and realizing that neither has public WiFi access that would allow me to continue working while I wait for my train.
• It’s bouncing down the tracks (literally) on the U.S.’s only high speed rail line, Amtrak’s Acela, which only runs at full speed for a fraction of the trip  and must crawl along the tracks at 20 or 30mph for long stretches. Acela’s vastly superior to the cattle car experience that commercial airlines offer these days, but it still takes three and a half hours to travel from Boston to New York. And when my six year old minivan can keep pace with our nation’s only “bullet train,” you know there’s a problem.
• It’s reading about the breakdown of the FAA’s aging computer system this week — the third since 2007 — which lost flight plans and caused countless delays and cancellations, which caused a ripple effect that pushed weary, disappointed travelers onto my evening Acela train up to Boston.
• It’s the five calls AT&T dropped on my trip from Boston to New York — perhaps the most densely populated corridor in the entire country.
• Its the five or so of my cell phone calls that get dropped for lack of coverage every day, even though I’m rarely further than 7 miles from Beacon Hill in dowtown Boston, a metropolis of 4 million people. I remember driving north of Boston a few years back with a former colleague of mine, a Brit who was a tech reporter in Tokyo. He noted all the billboards from Verizon  trumpeting how great their coverage was and how few dropped calls their customers had. He laughed at the notion, saying that in Japan, cell service was so ubiquitous and reliable that even implying that there were any gaps in your coverage would be laughable – -like Toyota marketing around how rarely its car airbags failed to deploy in an accident.
• It’s reading about how the Chinese government is throwing up new roads and bridges at an astonishing pace, while pieces of the Bay bridge drop into morning traffic in San Franciso and the Lake Champlain Bridge, an 80 year old bridge spanning the 120 mile long Lake Champlain and linking Vermont to New York State is closed in October after engineers discovered it was in danger of imminent collapse. That’s upended the entire economy of the region – - forcing farmers, residents and businesses owners to drive 100 miles out of their way to move goods.
• It’s reading about the $1 million per soldier we’ll spend this year to keep troops in Afghanistan or the worry that the government in Iraq lacks the will or expertise to maintain the new infrastructure that $53 billion in relief and reconstruction  money the U.S. government has poured into the country since the start of the war – hospitals, power plants and tranformers, roads. It all sounds good to me. Here in Massachusetts,  the State laying off social workers who help the poor and protect children in danger of abuse and the School Committee in my home town of Belmont (of which I’m a member) is weighing a deep budget shortfall that could result in deep cuts to services for lack of funds.

Infrastructure...good! Along the Erie Canal - 1908

It wasn’t always this way. From its first inception as a country, the states and our Federal government spent aggressively and creatively to improve the quality of life for its citizens. The Erie Canal, just one example, was one of the first major engineering projects in the country and a marvel of innovation when it opened in 1825 — 18 aqueducts  and 83 locks, with a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. It was 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide. The canal turbocharged the entire economy of the region, enabling farmers and businesses to easily transfer freight to market (the original canal supported boats carrying 30 tons of freight, but the canal and locks were subsequently deepened and widened to support barges carrying up to ten times that amount.)

This is a rant, I know. And the fixes to this problem are big and complex and will take decades to realize. My home town of Boston is certainly no role model – we sank $15b into a poorly designed highway and leaky tunnel project that didn’t do a darned thing to alleviate traffic and has saddled the state with debt for a generation or more. It’s worth thinking about this Wednesday or Thursday, as you’re waiting in the airport terminal because  of a flight delay, or sitting in bumper to bumper traffic. We’d all like things to get better and faster (and greener). But will they? and how?

Gambling, quickie weddings, legal prostitution and EoT - What could be better?

Gets posted on Every Other Thursday! This week Scott and I are going to be in Vegas for a work-related conference and will be sending updates to the EoT Twitter account. If you’re not following — and chances are you aren’t — get on board today and don’t miss out on all of the fun. This will be a Dad’s guide to Vegas, Every Other Thursday-style!

Look forward to tweets about basketball, beer, gambling, drunk fun, marriage and everything else you can possibly want from two wacky dads cruising the Strip.

It’s also an uncomfortable experience because I hate breaking my routine. We get into habits and grooves, becoming creatures of habit. When that routine is broken, it throws us for a loop.

The biggest reason travel makes me uneasy is that I miss the family. The kids are young and they don’t understand what it means for daddy to be gone for that long of a period, as they are used to routines as well. I know I will see them in a matter if hours, but trying to explain that to a nearly six year old and a three old is like trying to read and understand the healthcare reform legislation. Regardless, it’s hard and I miss them (and Mrs. Big Guy as well).

On the flip side, these travel opportunities are exciting and new. It’s an experience I embrace because it’s good to test yourself every once and a while — push yourself if you will. Comfort zones are meant to be stepped out of from time to time.

That goes for business practices as well. Success only comes if you take risks and step out of that comfort zone. Eventually those out of comfort zone experiences will become part of the routine. Then it’s time to do it all again.

p.s. I am writing this from 35,000 feet. I am having one of those out of comfort zone days.

One way I found to redirect the anxiety about my business trips was to promise to bring them a memento from the road when I did any travel involving airplanes. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Acquisitive little creatures that they are, their thoughts upon learning that I’ll be going out of town immediately turn to the swag — to the point that when I called my wife to say that I had landed in San Diego, my baby girl got on the phone to ask me what I’d bought her. On my end, however, carving out 45 minutes to do a souvenir hunt on a business trip can be daunting, especially on short trips like this one.

Some trips gave me free time for some creative shopping — trips to Chinatown in San Francisco for mini kites, or Matruska dolls from a trip to Moscow. Some were so compacted that I was left to sprint for a t-shirt stand on the way to my gate at the airport.

After much trial and error, the girls and I have settled on a happy compromise: snow globes. You know the kind I’m talking about — water-filled souvenir globes from various cities with little vignettes. They come in all shapes and sizes– there must be 10 different varieties of New York City snow globes with different skylines and assortments of cabs and pedestrians. San Francisco has a great Haight and Ashbury snow globe with a peace sign and two stoned looking hippies in tie dyes standing on the famous street corner. Snow globes are small, affordable and ubiquitous. They’re used, indiscriminantly, to depict even the hottest most forbidding locales as if they were a quaint, wintry New England countryside. I’ve never been to Death Valley California, but I’m guessing there’s a snow globe in the shop there memorializing it for passersby. My girls love them, too — they take them down off the shelf and line them up, shake them up to watch the “snow” fall and use them as the framework for elaborate games of make believe.

Depending on when I get home, I’ll leave them out on the kitchen tables for the girls to open when they get up. In other scenarios, I’m mobbed before I can even set foot in the door — hugs followed by the inevitable question “did you remember to get us anything?” It’s a lot of pressure. So if you see me scurrying about downtown San Diego tomorrow afternoon, just point me to the nearest snow globe dispensary and I’ll be on my way. I’m just holding up my end of the bargain, here!