Are you a napper?

And if you are, what kind of napper are you? Are you an out-of-the-closet napper? Do you loudly and proudly announce to the house that you are taking a nap, and that you’re not to be disturbed?

Or are you a guilty napper? Do you have self-loathing issues when it comes to your napping habit? Do you sneak into the bedroom like a Catholic priest with a handful of gay porn, secretly ashamed but unable to stop yourself?

The reason I ask you this question is because my friend Eileen asked me. Eileen is a health-care communicator in Oregon, and she recently outed herself in the Ragan Report as a chronic napper.

Here’s part of what she wrote:

“I have a dirty, little secret. Have had it for years. I have arranged my life, privately, personally and professionally to compensate for this secret. And I’m wondering, Am I alone or is this something common to all writers?

Here it is: I am a napper. Big-time napper. There’s nothing ‘cat’ or ‘power’-like about my naps. We’re talking under the covers, turn off the lights, close the curtains and sleep for a full-on two hours.”

Eileen is convinced that napping makes her a better writer, and a better person. She also has a theory that many writers are nappers, and she’s doing an informal study to find out if she’s right.

For my part, I am a napper. When I can be. Because much of my time is spent either consulting or speaking, I can’t nap every day, like Eileen. If I could, I would. But because I travel so much and speak so much, I can’t nap nearly as much as I’d like to.

I probably average one nap a week. Sure, I go on nap binges when I’m not traveling. I’ve been known to nap every day for four days straight. But I’ll also go two or three weeks without ever napping.

I don’t need to nap. I can go on the nap wagon anytime I want to. But when I can nap, I enjoy the hell out of it.

And I always thought I was okay with my napping. I never thought it was a problem, and I didn’t think I felt guilty about it at all. Until last night.

Last night, I was out with my wife Cindy, Ragan publisher (and the man who married Cindy and me) Jim Ylisela, and his wonderful wife, Nora.

We were drinking and talking about sleep habits, and I was chiding Cindy because she likes to sleep later than I do.

That’s when Cindy outed me. “Oh, yeah, Mr. Get Up Early . . . it’s easy to get up at 5 a.m. when you know you’re going to take a nap later.”

When she said that, I was filled with rage. How dare she? I felt like she had just told the group that I diddled little boys three times a week. I felt dirty. I felt like she had betrayed a serious confidence.

Now . . . why did I feel that way? What’s wrong with napping? I work more than eight hours a day, most days. I am a terrific father, a good husband, a fairly popular speaker, and a prolific writer in my chosen field. Who gives a good God damn if I take naps once or twice a week, if I’m not traveling or on deadline?

I care, it seems. I’m a self-loathing napper. Probably because of my Catholic upbringing. When you are raised Catholic, you are made to feel guilty about everything from masturbation to third-world poverty.

Although the topic never came up in school, I’m sure the Catholic doctrine is anti-nap.

“The Good Lord Jesus didn’t take naps,” the nuns and priests would no doubt tell us, if they ever found out we were nappers. “And Jesus was nailed to a cross and died a horrible death because of YOU. If anybody needed a nap, it was Jesus, and he didn’t take naps. Why should YOU?”

I want to know if anybody else out there naps. If you do, how do you feel about being a napper? And, do you find it helps your productivity when you nap? Or are you just trying to justify your filthy little habit?

And I’m not talking about “El Jardin’s Naps.” These are the naps you take at 2:30 in the afternoon, after drinking four jumbo margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, after you stumble home and pass out diagonally on the bed, on your stomach, for 2 hours, only to wake with a raging headache and a stomach full of broken glass.

I’m talking about normal, sober naps. Good naps. Naps that leave you feeling refreshed and wonderful and ready to kick the world’s ass.

Does anyone take those kinds of naps? And if so, how do you deal with the guilt?

The reports of my death have been slightly exaggerated.

I’m not dead . . . but it has been a hell of a two weeks. In fact, that’s why I haven’t blogged. I had so much I wanted to blog about that I got paralyzed into inaction. I didn’t know where to start, so I didn’t start.

For instance, there was my roller coaster ride to the IABC Conference in Vancouver. The trip started with me getting bumped off my flight in Chicago, spending a night in an airport hotel with no clothes or toiletries, wiping out almost the entire contents of a minibar, ordering a $100 bottle of Cakebread Cabernet from room service, and sitting on the end of the hotel bed at 3 in the morning, completely naked, weeping uncontrollably over a M*A*S*H rerun.

(You know that dark-haired woman that runs to the helicopter at the beginning of the show, while that haunting theme song plays? I fell in love with her when I was 13, and I still sometimes get drunk and weepy, thinking about her.)

As bad as the trip began, it ended gloriously—with me sitting on a secluded beach in Vancouver, drinking local wine and watching the sun set, as my friend Ron Shewchuck, the Barbeque King of Canada, grilled racks of lamb and salmon and fed them to me.

At one point in the evening, Ron jumped in the ocean for a swim, and encouraged me to do the same. But since I didn’t have a suit, I would have had to go in naked. Normally, I wouldn’t have a problem with that—in fact, I love the idea.

But at this particular beach, there are regular seal sightings. In fact, entire families go there to look for seals.

And, given my pale, hairless body and bald, bullet-shaped head, I was afraid that if I went in, I would hear some kid yell to his mom: “Mommy, look at that gross seal. What’s the matter with it, Mommy? Why is it so much bigger and uglier than the other seals, and why is it so white?”

To which Mommy would say back: “Oh, that’s an albino seal, honey. It’s by itself because none of the other seals want to be near it. That’s what we call a ‘freak of nature.”

And, no matter how much self confidence I pretend to have, I couldn’t have dealt with that.

After Vancouver, I went to Washington, DC with Jim Ylisela and Mark Ragan, to teach the Advanced Writing and Editing class. And that is a whole separate blog item, because we stayed in a bed and breakfast with a crazy innkeeper who likes to sit outside his establishment and loudly harass the people who walk by.

I had one of my favorite nights ever with this guy (sitting with him outside and harassing the people who walked by), and he may be the greatest communicator I’ve ever met. I’ll tell you all about him tomorrow.

So . . . sorry for not posting for so long. I believe that if you’re going to have a blog, you have a responsibility to keep it up . . . and I failed miserably at that for the past two weeks.

But the good news is, I’ve got so many great stories to share . . . about employee communications, insane innkeepers, government communicators, flying, etc., that I’ll be blogging every day for a week.

Thank you for your continued patience.

I have a question for the people out there who toil in a corporate environment:

Does your company still do “diversity” or “sensitivity” training?

I realize there are subtle differences between “sensitivity” training and “diversity” training, but they are also very similar, in that they are both complete and utter bullshit.

I ask the question because “sensitivity training” is all the rage here in Chicago right now, because of Ozzie Guillen.

For those who don’t follow baseball, Ozzie is the manager of the Chicago White Sox. Ozzie is from Venezuela, and he’s been playing or coaching major league baseball since he was 15. The man has grown up in locker rooms. Any life lessons he has learned—and he hasn’t learned many—he learned from other jocks.

Which means he’s very smart about baseball, and very stupid about everything else in life. I mean, the man is a moron. More importantly, he’s one of those morons who was born without a mental filter: whatever random thought that enters into his pea brain comes tumbling out of his big mouth. And it’s usually profane and idiotic.

He has what they call in Italy: Donno wenna shuttupa disease . . . he just doesn’t know when to shut his mouth.

Last week, Ozzie called a local newspaper columnist a fag. He hates this guy, and he hates that the guy bashes him in print, and then doesn’t come in to the clubhouse to face him “mano a mano.”

So he called him a fag.

When the ensuing media firestorm hit, Ozzie had two defenses:

1. He didn’t mean that the man was an actual “fag”—in that he likes to have sex with men. He meant he was a sissy, a coward. That’s what the word means in Venezuela, Ozzie says.

(You should know that Ozzie is always talking about how things are different in Venezuela, and people are a lot tougher, and how the men there have huge Venezuelan balls that make American testicles look like m&ms, or raisins.

He’s always talking about what a “macho” culture Venezuela is, and how you settle things there man-to-man, by punching the other man in the face repeatedly . . . even if the other man happens to be your wife, or your mother.)

2. His second defense was that, even if he DID mean to call the reporter an actual fag, he has nothing against fags. Really.

This is where you learn how really, genuinely stupid the man is, because he actually tried the old, “I have gay friends” argument. Which, by itself, might not be too bad. But he actually said this, too:

“I even went to the Madonna concert.”

His theory being, of course, that only two groups of people go to a Madonna concert:

1. Fags
2. People who don’t mind fags.

Since Ozzie is not a fag (they actually burn fags at the stake down in Venezuela, according to Ozzie, but not until they cut their balls off and turn them into baseballs; even the fags in Venezuela have bigger balls than the Americans, according to Ozzie) you have to assume, he says, that he is in the second group of Madonna concert goers, and that he truly does not mind fags.

It’s an interesting cultural diversity study, isn’t it?

Anyway, to punish Ozzie for being an idiot, Major League Baseball is sentencing him to “Sensitivity Training,” meaning he’s going to have to sit in a room with a black woman for six hours and explain why he doesn’t really hate fags.

I’ve been intrigued by the idea of “Sensitivity Training” ever since the government announced that anyone found guilty of torturing prisoners in Iraq or Guantanamo Bay would have to undergo “Sensitivity Training.”

I always had a hard time wondering what the final test would be, to see if the soldiers passed the training and could once again guard prisoners of war. I wonder if it would have questions like these:

1. You have a prisoner that you are guarding, and the two of you are alone. It is okay to:

A. Strip him naked and jam an ungreased cattle prod up his ass.
B. Strip him naked and jam a greased cattle prod up his ass.
C. Strip him naked and gently touch his testicles with a cattle prod
D. Follow the Geneva Convention’s rules about the humane way to treat a prisoner.

2. You have a group of 10 Muslim prisoners, whose religion considers homosexuality a sin against Allah. It is okay to:

A. Strip them all naked and force them to simulate anal sex with each other.
B. Strip them all naked and force them to actually have anal sex with each other.
C. Strip them all naked and force them to actually have anal sex with each other while you beat them about the heads and shoulders with a hockey stick.
D. Follow the Geneva Convention’s rules about the humane way to treat prisoners.

I just don’t see how Sensitivity Training is going to change anything in that sort of situation. And that goes for Ozzie, too. Does anybody seriously think that a moron like Ozzie Guillen will benefit from this?

Can you take a 42-year-old man and change his spots with some “training?”

I can only imagine the conversations that will take place at that training facility:

(To envision the scene, you should know that when Ozzie talks, he sounds like Al Pacino in Scarface)

Sensitivity Trainer (A large black woman who towers over Ozzie): Now, Mr. Guillen, I understand that you called a reporter a “fag.” Is that true?

Ozzie (who is busy filling out that night’s lineup card and barely looks up): Yeah. He’s a piece a chit faggot. That wha I said.

Sensitivity Trainer: Are you threatened by homosexuals?

Ozzie (scratching his crotch the entire time he talks): Chit, no. I not threatened by nobody. In Venezuala, we chew faggots up and spit them in the chitter. I dinna even mean he was a homo. I just mean he was a sissy, no cajones, you know what I mean?

ST: So you don’t feel he has actually ever placed his penis in another man’s oral or anal cavity?

Ozzie (who is now tugging ferociously on his crotch): Oh man, why you talk tha way, man? You make me feel all wiggly an chit. In Venuzuela, anal cavities only used for chitting, you know? Only fags use anal cavaities for sick chit, man.

ST: Can you see why someone would be offended if you called him a fag?

Ozzie (laughing): Only if he was a fag, right? If he ain’t no fag, why he care?”

ST: Can you understand why the gay community would be upset?

Ozzie: Chit, I ain got no problem with the gay community. As long as they ain no gay community in my locker room messin with no anal cavities, I don’t care.

ST: So you don’t have a problem with gay people, as long as they don’t come anywhere near you?

Ozzie: Now you got it, sister. You think I should rest Konerko tonight, or Thome?

I’m looking for case studies. I’m looking for one single person who has ever been changed by Diversity or Sensitivity Training. If you know of anyone, please send them to me.