Hey, am I still in this race?

There's an old bridge near where I live, crossing a part of Great Bay. Unused by traffic now for several years, it serves as a place for people to fish, walk, run and bike, all the while taking in the sights of the water and landscape beyond. It is a lovely place on my route for walking or running.

The other day I came across some graffiti that had been spray painted on a part of the bridge's aging pavement. "Even if you win the race," it said, "you're still a RAT!" Included with message were spray-painted images of the Three Blind Mice, one in red, one in white and one in blue.

It was a bit ironic really to be running at the time, listening to music through my headphones, contemplating a to-do list in my head and come across a reference to the rat race. And I began to wonder: Am I still even in the rat race anymore?

The rat race, of course, is that euphemistic term that applies to the self-defeating pursuit of working too hard to get ahead, stay afloat. In the normal scheme of our lives, in the every day routine of work, we sometimes feel like the lab rat navigating the maze or the rat on the wheel, running fast but getting nowhere.

The fact that it's called a race raises the notion that we're competing against each other for money, for status, for a higher rung on the ladder at work. We navigate the maze and run in the wheel in pursuit of a nice house in a nice neighborhood with good schools for our kids. We're always racing to get ahead.

But I think that changes as you get older. It definitely changes when you're out of the workforce.

It's not that we're not in the race anymore, it's that the race priorities change. We might be a lap or two behind, we could be a couple of miles behind the race leaders, but we don't care. The rat race can leave us behind at the starting line for all we care.

As I got older, as I approached retirement I got less worried about the self-defeating aspects of the rat race. I'd gotten as far as I was going to get, which was pretty far, and I wasn't going to worry about it anymore. It didn't matter that work sometimes became a maze of worry. It didn't matter that I was running on the wheel and getting nowhere, at least I was getting my exercise of earning a living, providing for my family.

In semi-retirement it's different. There's still work to be done, but it's a different work, at a different pace, on a different rat race course altogether. My pace is driven by me, not by someone else's clock or someone else's deadlines or someone else's expectations. It's like I'm in a rat race of one, competing against myself. And I don't really care what place I'm in.

There will always be a rat race of one kind or another. I know I'm not the fastest rat in the race, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. And that's just fine.

One step removed, one step closer

I acquired a step-son-in-law recently; it sounds a little awkward, but that's the way it is in the family tree made broader by divorces and remarriages.

It's hard enough for me to remember relatives by birth and exactly who is connected to whom. With the broader definition of family these days it may become downright impossible for me to remember who's who as I climb through the family tree.

For immediate family, I'm not too worried getting tangled up in the various branches. I'm one of eight children of Marge Briand and the late Paul Briand Jr. I have two children, Elizabeth and David. I have seven brothers and sisters  -- Kate, Annemarie, Margaret, Bruce, Ella, David and Joe -- and I know their husbands/wives and their children/stepchildren. I know my mother's siblings -- two sisters and a late brother, and I know their spouses and children. Same on my father's side -- two brothers and a sister, their spouses, their children.

So, by blood, I've got brothers and sisters, brothers- and sisters-in-law, daughter and son, nieces and nephews, and cousins that I can readily identify. Where it gets terribly complicated for me are the branches beyond that.

My cousin's children -- I think I've got this right -- are my first cousins once removed. (I was never sure by whom they were removed, but there's a lot about the intricacies of genealogy that I don't comprehend.) I've got a vague notion there, often requiring prompting from my mom who's very, very good at knowing how all the branches fit into the tree. But I have no clue as to the identities of the children of my first cousins once removed, the second cousins.

Complicating all this are the in-laws from my first marriage -- the people to whom I was a son-in-law and brother-in-law. I think the fact that I'm no longer married to their daughter/sister makes me an ex-son-in-law and ex-brother-in-law, but I am I an ex-uncle to the children on that side of the family? I really don't know and I don't think Miss Manners has written a lengthy protocol on that one.

So when I married my second wife, Jane, we introduced a step into the family tree. I became a step-father to Patrick, Kelsey, Eileen and Reilly. I acquired a new mother-in-law and new relatives by marriage. Elizabeth and David have a step-brother and step-sisters. By the same token, Jane's children have a step-brother and step-sister in David and Elizabeth (and have two other step-sisters, by the way, by virtue of their father's second marriage).

We have, in a sense, stepped into each others fabric of life -- the marriages, the births, the baptisms, the birthdays, etc., etc.

Which circles us back to my step-son-in-law, Jeremy who married my stepdaughter Kelsey.

I did look up the proper terminology and indeed the husband of my step-daughter is my step-son-in-law. Which further begs the question: Their children will be what to me? Their step-grand-dad? You begin to believe that at some point the branches of the tree bend too far for comprehension.

But let's not hurry things here on the grandchildren part of the tree. No rush, Jeremy and Kelsey, no rush at all. I'm in no hurry right now to be a grand-dad of any kind, step or not. I'm still getting my head around the fact that Elizabeth and David, both in their 20s, are old enough to drive a car.

The undoing of the perfect 10

Alas, the perfect 10 is no more.

Nadia Comanice, Mary Lou Retton, Bo Derek: They are now mere footnotes in the history of perfection.

Their status of having achieved the perfect 10 has been undone by a new scoring method that muddies the water of perfection because, in essence, there is no perfect score. The pinnacle, the apex, the acme of flawless is gone. Ultimately, you're just better than those who scored fewer points than you.

I came to this conclusion after watching the first nights of men's and women's gymnatics coverage at the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China. Scores were coming in at 14.1 or 14.8 or 15.4, which I couldn't figure as being good, bad or indifferent.

No longer can you look at something or someone and express, "That's definitely a 10." You're not going to look at someone and say, "Hmmm, definitely a 14.8." The observations have no contextual relevance for perfection.

Perfection in gymnastics, where the idea of the perfect 10 came to be, is now a moving target.

Comanice and Retton had their own scores of perfection, Comanice notably during the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Retton's perfect routine on the vault came at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

But the gymnastics ruling body -- the International Gymnastics Federation -- moved the scoring away from the perfect 10 as a result of controversies at the 2004 Olympics. Now an athlete's score has two parts -- difficulty of the routine and execution. If a gymnast plans a routine with a high degree of difficulty, he/she automatically starts out with a difficulty score that's higher than someone who's doing a routine with an average amount of difficulty. Then the judges score on the execution of the routine -- whether there are any stumbles, or missed elements, or falls, etc. The addition of the two results in the gymnast's score.

To give some perspective, U.S. gymnast Nastia Liukin won the individual gold yesterday in Beijing. Her winning score for her floor exercise was 15.25. Impressive? Absolutely. Perfect? We'll never know.

Sometimes you need a standard to measure yourself against. In school if you were perfect you received a grade of 100. The best you could do on your grade point average was a 4.0. But even that's changed. The high school kids who take advance placement classes and do real well can actually have a GPA that's greater than a 4.0. Does that mean they are that much better than perfect? It's confusing -- isn't perfect perfect?

It's apparent we do not live in a black and white world of flawed and perfect. We live in a world with multiple shades of gray, where there are no absolutes: there is no black, there is no white, there are a multitude of variations in between.

At least one perfect gymnast understands. Retton told the New York Times: "It's simple. People get it, and you don't have to explain it. Everybody could relate to it. I miss it, and I think other people will, too."

As for Bo Derek, it's a good thing her movie "10" came out when it did -- in 1979. God knows what we'd call the movie today -- "15.2", "17.1"? That's not doing it for me.

Discourse that is sometimes off course

I got a glimpse recently into the discourse of the 21st century. It's both fascinating and troubling.

The glimpse came through YouTube, the on-line video posting service. YouTube gives you the opportunity to make your videos available for everyone to see, and everyone in turn has the opportunity to rate and comment on your offering.

What I saw was fascinating in how immediate and wide-ranging the commentary can be. It was troubling in that most of the discussion was done in grammar shorthand that almost requires a translation dictionary. It was additionally troubling in the fact that some of the discussion was so inane.

Here's a little background: I recently purchased a Flip Mino camcorder. It's small and very easy to use, records to an internal memory -- no tapes, no memory cards to insert and extract. You can shoot a video and easily transfer it by way of a USB connection to your computer, then easily upload to YouTube or other video-sharing web sites.

I took my new gizmo to Fenway Park in Boston for the Aug. 30 game between the Red Sox and Los Angeles Angels. This was the week the trade rumors regarding Sox left fielder and slugger Manny Ramirez were at a fever pitch with the trade deadline set to expire the next afternoon. I took video of the crowd doing "the wave" and singing "Sweet Caroline" during the middle of the eighth inning. During the Red Sox half of the eighth it dawned on me it could be the last at-bat for Ramirez as a member of the Red Sox.

So I recorded the at-bat, which ended as a fly-out, and sure enough the next day Manny was traded to the L.A. Dodgers. I posted the Manny video on YouTube and over the next several days watched as the number of views grew and grew.

This Manny video and was not record-breaking content by any means. As of this writing, my view count was up to about 3,800. Some videos generate hundreds of thousands of views. One current video of some guy in China using telephone touch pads to play piano music is up to almost 500,000.

The fact that it generated that much viewer interest was amusing. The fact that a video prompted wide-ranging discussion involving Boston vs. Los Angeles sports, the Boston vs. New York rivalry, and Ramirez's potential Baseball Hall of Fame credentials was a real eye opener. The Manny video has 70 comments attached to it.

But here's the but:

What am I to make of: "yaya wat ev!!!!" Or: "And if ur not a laker fan which team u voting 4?"

I know it's all part of the new keyboard shorthand, but I'm old school when it comes to communicating -- I believe in writing in complete sentences, in emails and on the BlackBerry. One writer talked of Manny being "indicted" into the Hall of Fame. My temptation as the video poster was not to join in the conversation to talk of the merits of Manny going into the Hall of Fame; my temptation was as a former newspaper editor to discourage poor usage and tell the writer that someone is "inducted" not "indicted" into the Hall of Fame.

The discourse contained some troubling profanity and an occasional racial or lifestyle epithet. I didn't interpret the epithets as being meant to harm; they were meant to emphasize a point but were still inappropriate no matter their context.

I come from a generation of writing on paper and in middle age made the migration to the bits and bytes of online. But certain rules that guided me on paper guide me online, as does writing behavior.

It's an unedited and anything-goes online universe. The good news is that it generates discourse that is often impassioned and reasoned; the bad news is that u r left 2 wondering how much of it will degenerate into shorthand rants that ultimately will dissolve from discourse to babble.

Trying to stare down time

I have a lot of time on my hands right now. I mean, literally, I have a lot of time in the form of clocks and watches, and they keep staring at me like I'm supposed to be doing something with my time now that I've retired.

Within my field of vision of my writing space here at home, I have six clocks telling me what time it is. Worse, they keeping tell me I have a lot of time on my hands.

What is it about retirement and watches/clocks? Why are they usually given as gifts when someone retires? A web search to answer that question doesn't offer much help. The search results are almost exclusively gift ideas for retirement and 95 percent of the gift ideas are for watches or clocks. Could it possibly be rooted in the notion that retirement gives us time to do whatever we want? Or is it meant to remind us how much time we put into a particular job?

I received one retirement gift that feeds the notion. It came from my wife Jane -- at the suggestion of her brother David -- and it marks my retirement date and the 30 years I was with the company. And, as I indicated above, it ticks away on my desk along with five other time pieces -- an electronic baseball scoreboard that has an electronic clock, a clock that also keeps track of low and high tides, the clock on my computer screen, the clock on my cellphone and the Timex on my wrist.

Then there's my body clock ... which does a pretty good job of keeping general time, especially when it's time to eat. It tells me when to get up; it tells me when to sleep. (And these days when it tells me to take a quick sleep in the afternoon, I don't have to tell it no.)

It was my body clock that has required the most adjustment -- the greatest amount of re-timing -- in the couple of months since I stopped working full time. My work week for many, many years was fairly regimented, each day a structured effort to get things done. At the gym most mornings to get the exercise part done. At the office by 9 a.m. to get the work part done. Eat lunch at noon to get the nourishment part done. Drink coffee at 2 p.m. to get the mid-day kick part done. Home by 6 p.m. to get the dinner part done. In bed by 10 p.m. to get the sleep part done.

The assumption by most people was how great it would be not to be a slave to time. I could sleep in. I could stay up as late as I wanted. In fact, for a while there the body clock went in the opposite direction. For example, it alarmed me awake at 5 each morning, anxious about what was on the day's agenda, when in fact there wasn't much of an agenda at all. Yes, there was some online content I've been developing, but nothing that required me to be awake that early. I'm an early riser, but 5 a.m. was a little excessive.

The good news is that after a couple of months my clocks and I have reached an understanding. Chill out. There's no hurry, no reason to get anxious, no need to be running mentally through a to-do list at 4:45 a.m. There's plenty of time for everyone and everything. Want to surf? There's time for that. Want to write and develop some online content? There's time for that? Want to do yard work? Well, let's not get carried away.

Time is not the enemy, which is something Jean-Luc Picard, the sage captain of the Starship USS Enterprise, observed during the 1994 movie "Star Trek: Generations."

"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives," he said. "I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived."

I have plenty of companions for my journey. If I could just get them all agree to what time it is.