Scholtes-Blog

Month: January 2019

  • Twenty-Three

    Twenty-Three

    The Flatiron Building is at 23rd Street and Fifth Ave. in New York City. It’s shaped like a triangle, because Broadway cuts through that block at an acute angle. This sets up wind currents all around the building, which can sometimes lead to downdrafts and updrafts. Back at the turn of the 20th century, when…

  • Twenty-Two

    Twenty-Two

    Cervantes wrote a book called Don Quixote. I tried reading it once (in translation), but I couldn’t get far into it. Yet I know all about who Don Quixote was. A man who tilted at windmills. He thought they were giants, but fought the windmills. He had dreams and delusions that he was someone outstanding, and…

  • Twenty-One

    Twenty-One

    In the United States, twenty-one is the gate. The gate that blocks access to the most coveted substance in modern society: alcohol. In the United States, twenty-one symbolizes that gate in at least two ways. There’s the obvious one: you need to be twenty-one years old in order to legally drink. And there’s also the twenty-first amendment to the…

  • Twenty

    Twenty

    This is yet another story from my own life, but despite the way the last few posts have been going, it’s not from when I was twenty. No, I was twenty-five when this happened. When my wife Heather and I were dating, we used to play Twenty Questions a lot. You know, the game where one person…

  • Nineteen

    Nineteen

    So in a way, today’s post is a sequel to yesterday’s. You’d think it would take place right after it. Yesterday’s post was about the year I was eighteen, so you’d think this one would be about when I was nineteen. Well, it sort of is. But most of the action took place long before I…

  • Eighteen

    Eighteen

    The number eighteen, I’m told, is important in Judaism. The reason for this is because words in Hebrew have numerical values, and the Hebrew word for life, “chai”, has a numerical value of eighteen. Looking back on my own life, the number eighteen can easily symbolize “life” for me as well. The year I was eighteen, which spanned my…

  • Seventeen

    Seventeen

    Some of you have been waiting with bated breath for this. This is the post wherein I reveal the reason for the bizarre little survey you took last week. Okay. Here’s the deal. Apparently “17” is the least random number. What the heck does that mean? Well, it means that according to a few websites…

  • Sixteen

    Sixteen

    The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is basically a personality test. You answer dozens of questions, and based on your answers, you are fit into one of sixteen categories, which apparently describe your way of relating to the world. There are four axes, and you are rated on where you fall on each of them. The first…

  • Fifteen

    Fifteen

    When I was in tenth grade, my geometry teacher, Mr. 51, used to give everyone nicknames. Whenever he’d call on you, it would be by your nickname. For instance, there was another Mike in my class (there was always another Mike) who had an after-school job at Burger King. His nickname was “BK Broiler.” And…

  • Fourteen

    Fourteen

    The “Stations of the Cross” are a spiritual tool commonly found in Roman Catholic churches. The Stations themselves are stops on a path that one walks. The path is like a pilgrimage of sorts, telling the story of the Passion of Jesus Christ. Each Station on the path represents one part of that story, and…