Podcast - Adam Savage Project
Teenagers – 2/17/2015
Adam, Will, and Norm discuss their goals and failures as teenagers, the prospect of raising teenagers in the 21st century.
Comments (30)
Adam, Will, and Norm discuss their goals and failures as teenagers, the prospect of raising teenagers in the 21st century.
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I met my wife on yahoo personals and married her one month to the day of our first date. 13 years and counting with my best friend 😀
Also what advice would you give to a 5 – 6 year old boy?
If I could go back to talk to myself I would try and express how much free time you have in high school. I always thought I would have more time to do the things I loved when I was done, but your life only gets busier. I would tell myself to build more stuff and learn more techniques.
On the topic of communication in dating. I am in a long distance relationship, but we see each other on skype often. We sometimes sit for hours doing our own thing with it running next to us so that we are kind of together. It is astounding to think about, considering we are across the country from one another and yet we talk constantly.
What would you have wanted to know at 17?
My answer to this actually comes from Adam, to paraphrase: Three years from now you will look back at yourself now and be amazed at how wrong you were about everything. This will repeat itself forever.
This is as true now at my current age as it would have been at 20. It has helped me live a bit more in the moment, to be aware that motivations and circumstances change and to not put too much stake in a single plan for the future.
Concerning your comment about not understanding cisgender. I have a Transgender friend and after talking to them about many different things, here is my simplified understanding of it.
First off, a transgender person is someone who is born a specific gender but they associate with another gender. So if you are born physically male, but you feel like you should be female, you would define that as Transgender.
If you are born a specific gender and you also associate yourself with that gender, then you are cisgender. So if you are born male, and you believe you should be male, then you are cisgender. This is regardles of sexual orientation. So a heterosexual male, and a homosexual male who both associate with being physically male, even though they sexually like different genders, are both cisgender.
My personal opinion is that this word is used to avoid statements like “well my one son is transgender but the other is normal.” As saying someone who associates with the gender that they were born with is “normal” could feel hurtful to those who have a different mentality from the physical body they were born with.
Hope that helps.
Best advice: read Machiavelli! (the prince) it won’t make life easier, but it’s the one book that will explain why people do certain things.
Seventeen? Hmm… stay in shape, for one, and take time to actually heal your injuries instead of muscling through them. Working for a living sucks but it’s something we’re good at; do better by learning more. Start writing sooner.
I retired last year. 45 years ago I finished college. During the last year I saw the first “pocket calculator” that was available. It was a 4 function calculator with a memory function. Everything up to that time and for a few years later was calculated with a Slide Rule with 3 figure accuracy. If you were a surveyor or needed a more accurate figures you used logarithms that were accurate to 10 places or more. Now I use my slide rule to stump all the guys I used to work with because I would show it to them when I first met them and ask them what it was. Rotary dial telephones also work.
Everything up to the 70’ies was calculated with slide rules to 3 places. Computers were humongous machines that only major companies and governments had.
Just a little more etymology: in organic chemistry there’s chirality, or handedness. One handedness is cis, and the other is trans. Therefore, using cis-gender as the opposite of trans-gender places them on equal footing, rather than saying something like “normal” as the opposite of transgender.
The way I heard it, it was a question about the terminology, not the concept.
(I just turned 22) I would go back and tell my 17 year old self this is the last year you get to do the things you want to do. At 18 you are going to become disabled and everything will be taken away from you so live this last year as jam packed as you can. (I graduated early and was already off studying Engineering at a University at this point) I would tell myself to go to that party, to go explore the world more, to go step out of my comfort zone and talk to that person across the room, and to go on the road trips with my friends. I was always so stressed out and concerned about doing everything perfect. I wish I had known then that perfection doesn’t exist. Just do the best I can and then have some fun!!
At 18 I got medically pulled out of school and had to move home. The doctors believed I had broken my back cheering and I had a brain tumor. Luckily one doctor noticed I was incredibly flexible and sent me to a new doctor who diagnosed me with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. It is a life threatening connective tissue disorder that causes my joints to dislocate on a daily basis and can cause my organs to rupture and kill me at anytime. Now at 22 I am fully disabled and in a wheelchair when I can manage to leave my house. I don’t know if I will make it to 30,40, or 50 years old so I try to take every opportunity I can. I push myself to do things that I didn’t think was possible because I might not get the chance again. I am still working on not being such a perfectionist, it is a hard trait to break. But since I have started doing the best I can I have enjoyed life so much more.
Moral of the story is you don’t know what is going to happen to you. In one years time everything I knew and loved was taken from me, and I have a future that is not guaranteed. So live every moment like it is your last, don’t put things off til tomorrow because tomorrow could never come in the way you are expecting!
What is Adam doing while you guys are doing the ads? I only ask because he’s in the background and looks like he’s organizing.
This post button keeps on lagging.
the only thing about it i heard differently was that “born as” was replaced by “assigned at birth,” stemming from the difference between gender, the social function, and sex, the physical configuration used as an indicator at birth to assign the baby’s place in society.
myself at 17? i’d try to tell myself to not try so hard, but that would never work. it was years before i found out why people stress me and why i am at odds with them so often. and i’m afraid that some things you find out about yourself only have that impact when you find them out yourself. they don’t work when being told. (and i’m pretty sure that being told by future-me wouldn’t have made a lick of difference to 17-year-old me)
Best advice about working for a living: Make them pay you to do something you want to do anyway!
–Paul E Musselman
I agree with you, don’t let fear hold you back from doing the things you want to do. I would tell my 17 year old self that I can pretty much do anything I want, and not to be pressured into doing things you don’t want. I too have EDS, luckily a more mild version of it, and I have sympathy for those that have it bad. I’m 25 now and there is a lot of stuff I want to accomplish, I just take it one day at a time.
The words of the song say it best:
Teach… your children well…
Teach… your parents well…
–Paul E Musselman
I’m surprised no one else has posted this for you. The Vonnegut word you’re looking for is ‘granfalloon’. It’s from the 1963 novel ‘Cat’s Cradle’. Wikipedia defines it as ‘a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless.’
And by the way, there is a bar in my hometown, Kansas City, MO named the The Granfalloon.
Wow it is so nice to meet a fellow EDS-er. I never thought I would meet someone on the Tested site with it!
Regarding moon landing deniers – I’m getting better at letting it go when people are wrong. I grew up in a nerdy household where correcting each other was the norm, but with the benefit of perspective, I can see there are many ways to be wrong that don’t actually matter. Does it matter that someone denies the moon landings (or regularly mispronounces a particular word, for example)? I’m a big fan of astronauts and space exploration, but some people aren’t. Never mind. I can enjoy my interests without them.
Apollo Moon landing deniers and conspiracy theorist in general are fun to listen to and I actually like them more than some other groups of people.
While most of the time I don’t subscribe to their thinking but it still is nice to be around people who know how to exercise their critical thinking skills, even even if it’s flawed logic, it’s still fascinating to follow their dots and learn where they are coming from. I enjoy this because ( if you know your subject matter) there will come a point when you can help them realize where they are wrong, and if you come at them from the stand point of a friend you’re more likely to have success in changing their mind to a correct line of thinking. And even if you end up disagreeing with them you still have gained a friend with critical thinking skills.
On the flip side, the average consumer who hasn’t looked at the evidence one way or the other and just blindly follows the dogma of the day, is a bore. Such a person and their superficial conversations generally makes me want to repeatedly smack them with a large heavy object. And yes I’m aware that this makes me sound like Jon Doe from the movie se7en and I’m ok with that. 😀
Check these out, they are cool
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/16/vintage-nasa-photographs_n_6673854.html
I like the banter at the start but you really only get like 15 minutes of on the topic discussion. If they pick a topic, Id rather them just get right into it because I feel like there would be more content for discussion.
Also, If we could go one podcast without mentioning a “Segue” that would be wonderful
Interesting that you meet your spouse(s) online. That’s how I met my husband. We’ve been married since 1984. Yes ‘84. Local BBS in Seattle. Don’t know how many other couples go back that far.😊
What is the best advice to maintaining a healthy and stable relationship in Highschool?
With regard to the “dating” part of the podcast, I met my wife online (using local BBSes) in the early 90s, and we were together for 19 years.
With regard to the “teenage” portion, I wish I’d known the full extent of what I could do. I would have transitioned when I was a teen instead of waiting until I was 35. I never really understood that I was the one in charge of my own happiness, so I left that up to other people and was sorely disappointed.
Pretty good explanation. As a trans woman, yes, the usage of the cis- and the trans- prefixes are for when you need to differentiate. It’s rude and kind of gross to talk about people as “normal” and “other”.
Just as in science, “cis” means “on the same side” and “trans” means “on the opposite side”. When in reference to gender it’s “my internals match the gender I was assigned at birth” vs “my internals don’t match the gender I was assigned at birth”
So, being a transgender woman, this means that I was AMAB (assigned male at birth) and that never felt correct to me. Adam, as a (presumably) cisgender man was AMAB, and that has always felt correct to him.
Tinder isn’t “cisgender,” but it is certainly more heterosexual than other services like Grindr (which caters to homosexual men), or Datch and Scissr (which cater to lesbian women), and others.
My 2 cents…never say “why start now”.
You can start learning new things at 25, 30, 36, 40 or 45 years of age. I certainly did and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
I don’t want to see a point at which I might say “why was I too afraid to try that back then. I was practically still a baby!”
So never think that it’s too late because it isn’t until you are dead! When you’re 60 then 50 will seem young and so on!
I still talk on the phone for hours with my gf, we Skype more often like adam’s kids do. It is very much like being in the first room.
I found giving advice as such doesn’t work because kids see through one’s bs. Just live it and they will follow your lead!
wait until you finish uni
Vonnegut also wrote a collections of essays called Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons. All three words are from Cat’s Cradle. What a great writer.