Author: admin

I’m starting over on my fantasy novel come Monday. My sci fi novel is gone for now–lost without backup to the horrors of the apple tech service. I should have been more responsible in making a back up but I was not. Lesson learned. Still, it gives me a chance to focus on a different project where I am not beholden to a shared world and only restricted by the boundaries of my choices and my imagination. This is a good thing. I feel I still have many things to say and explore through writing. I have not yet begun to see the end of the stories I can tell.

Some Thoughts:

1. Very tired. drained emotionally.
2. I can tell on these nights, where my typing is slow and failing and I cannot think straight, that I have little more to offer to the universe in this state and it is best to log off from reality for a while.
3. I used to recharge with minecraft meditations (or actual meditations) but I haven’t in some time. I cannot bring myself to meditate in any form. No idea why.

I own a conundrum of my own making. I need to find out how to get three kids to three different places across the valley (read: multiple cities separated by at least 20 miles) on the same evening once a week. I tend to create these grand scale problems and then drive myself insane attempting to make it all work. It is crazy, yet I do it and I prefer to do it, because I want to give my kids an amazing childhood–in many ways the one I never had.

This is one of my primary responsibilities in life. I have a responsibility to them. I have a responsibility to my partner. More and more I’ve begun to recognize that I have a responsibility to myself. I am no martyr. I want to be happy. Making the people in my life happy is a large part of that. It is important that I discover the rest.

It is equally important to note that I can be happy and usually am happy doing a number of things (coaching, teaching, working with writers, playing video games. Still, those are things I am happy doing as opposed to what fundamentally generates self-happiness.

Is fulfilling my responsibilities what makes me happy within myself? Not entirely. In truth, I don’t know what that internal happiness trigger or fulfillment looks like or how to uncover an answer. I’ve lived surrounded by dark and angry people most of my life and learned but one thing from that: they are fulfilled by anger vs. happiness. I’m not that person at all.

I believe we all fall into darkness. It is what helps us recognize the light. Lately—today specifically—has been a journey deeper into darkness. A bad day to be sure but the kind of bad day it is very hard to come through on the other side unscathed.

I learned about myself in this. I learned that I still get angry, especially when scared. I learned that I carry a lot of guilt and responsibility when it comes to the feelings of others and whatever it is I believe I’ve caused is amplified and strained down into even more anger within myself.

I learned—perhaps just remembered—that I’m not a good partner. That was a tough one, especially on the heels of understanding that I’m not a particularly good dad. I’m not evil. I don’t try to mess up minds and lives. Yet I feel like I don’t always leave the people who matter most feeling better and happier after encountering me.

now this could just be a bad day. This could also be something larger. This could be me stumbling into a greater realization about myself. It is on this particular day that I am reminded of an old film where the protagonist looks around at the destruction he’s caused and says in realization, “I’m the bad guy?”

well, I suppose I am. I don’t take the feelings of those who matter most into account when I should and the result is constantly catastrophic. Not too many people are good at sticking around when what they are sticking to is a catastrophe. Who’d blame them for leaving. In fact that is part of why it is so easy to wonder if they feel trapped by circumstance.

life has fed me a particularly difficult day at the end of a very long few weeks and I’m left to ponder the fact that I and I alone cooked the meal I’m being fed.

some thoughts:

1. in many ways the blog remains my tether to writing right now.

My computer informed me that I may have been hacked through an app or site and should immediately change my password to this specific blog. I didn’t. Truly, I should. It would be a shame to lose all of the material I have accumulated over the years. At the same time, I feel that the journey is equally important as the product. In fact in some ways a solid journey outweighs the product. Lately my writing has been mostly product–not great product at that. There is a hole in the words that reflects a lack of passion and attention to the life. I felt it, in a way, when I went back to the classroom. In class I felt the rush of excitement of building these new relationships and discovering what these students were capable of. I didn’t feel that upon return to my novel. Instead I felt the weight of the task and more than a little sense of impending doom.

As I said recently, there is a how-to book in all of this somewhere.

I’m in the midsts of a great period of growth and the weight of all of it is folding in around me in a way that seems to be pressing against the most important and most fragile parts of my life–the parts of understanding vs. action. That is where the words have slipped away like a coin lost to the folds of the couch. At the same time I feel a certainty that I can grow from this and that I will grow from this.

This is the first day of the rest of my life and yours. This is the day we start living our idyllic lives—the day we all take notice of the beauty that is the possibilities of life. Or maybe it isn’t.

I can honestly say that I’ve had more good times than bad and more highs than lows. I can argue that the lows helped to frame the good; the losses gave meaning to the wins. I say this because I fear that most of us try to make it through the day without stopping to reflect on the beauty that is the opportunity to have a day. We are blessed with senses and yet we often find ourselves more angry and despondent than those less blessed. We allow ourselves to be ruled by negative emotions and by the people who stand to gain from such negativity.

can you believe we are having real conversations about the possibility of a world war or a civil war right here? Can you believe that people are not even slightly interested in seeing how they are being manipulated?

I can. We often don’t want to see what we ought to. Tomorrow I start my research class and it is one that focuses on these ideas. It is designed to help recognize cognitive bias but I feel it needs an ending that reflects on what happens if we don’t and what good could happen if we do.

I’ll start to put that together in the morning and I can’t be more excited about bringing it to my class.

So, it begins again.

The things about being a teacher is that it is a sprint. It is a 16 week sprint where you start with a burst and try then to speed up until you push past the finish line. I’m lowering into the blocks (or whatever strange metaphor you’d use for the start of such things).

Some Thoughts:

1. The struggle is real in terms of getting into ‘writer mode’. I’ve been having a really hard time pushing myself to put words to paper beyond this blog and it really does make me question myself as a writer. I want to believe all writers go through such things. I don’t know that it is true.
2. It is not a matter of not having time. I watch a lot of tv and I play video games when possible. I don’t know if it is fear or lack of desire or fear of success or fear of failure or any number of things.
3. Here is what I suspect: What I am (and have been) going through is not isolated. I feel like there are books on such things already, but if I can break free, I might be in position to write a really good one.
4. I also suspect that a lack of actual paper reading is the cause of a lot of this. I need to move to correct that. Today.

Welcome to one of those steam of consciousness nights where I really have nothing to write about but still feel that the press of keys beneath my fingers makes me writer. A true writer, of course, writes and does the work. I’m writing for these ten minutes. Feels good to write something today. While it has been a chill weekend it also feels like the final approach to the front of the line at the roller coaster. I know things are about to take off and get very crazy. Likewise, I recognize that I’ll soon have a great deal to write about but, realistically, little time to devote to the actual craft. This feels like my lot in life as of late. I am familiar with it and not exactly a fan.

In short, I need to get a better grip on time and life management because neither has offered to wait or slow down for me at all. That leads to the question, what do I want that life to look like day to day? What am I making time for? How are the weekends different from the weekdays? Where is my bliss? I know where I find a great deal of it, but I cannot survive on those sweet moments. I feel as if I need more to sustain me. Now I’m getting very metaphorical and deep, yet not saying anything concrete.

I suppose this is what happens when you start out with nothing to really say.

Some Thoughts:

1. Still not doing the work.
2. Ravens lost. Badly. Turns out the Titans are the real deal–even without any real ability to throw the ball. I think it gives the Giants a legitimate blueprint.
3. I miss Minecraft, but there is nothing to listen to worth playing for.

I am starting to think that video games have something to do with short attention spa, and may lead to the eventual downfall of humanity. Yes, it is a lot to put on games, but consider this: We used to have the ability to delay gratification for a long time. Now we have to build in a zone of proximal development in nearly everything we do, less the participants quit.

Nobody wants to be bad at the game–no matter what game this is–be it life or GTA, we need to feel successful in order to want to continue. With so many games ready to occupy our moments, we turn to the ones that offer gratification quickly and repeatedly, making us feel like we earned the high. Life is not really like that. To use an example, science is about the ability to delay gratification for a long time–at least for the duration of an experiment and the intense vetting that precludes and follows said experiment. One of the key indicators of who is successful as a scientist and who can’t do the work.

I cannot do the work. I need gratification pretty regularly or I just get bored of the work. It is a constant struggle as a writer, because the writing is never a swift process. I’m very much a novelist not built to be a novelist. I knew this when I dropped out of the Aerospace Engineering program in my college years. I knew this when I started and quickly stopped considering a law degree. I see it everyday on the faces and in the actions of the young people in my life.

Some Thoughts:

1. Chill weekend.

As I prepare for the coming semester (only a few days off now) I find myself reflecting on the idea of teaching to and learning from freshman students. Last semester I was entirely closed off to learning from them. I had expectations of what students were and wanted and fired off a semester based entirely on assumption. I didn’t know what they wanted so much as I knew what I wanted and as a result I didn’t give them what they wanted so much as what I felt they needed. That has to change.

I’m starting the 101 conversation with an exploration of self and student. We will be doing a semester that culminates in the creation of Superheroes based on the zeitgeist. I want to start that with an exploration of who they are, what they like/love/dislike in their lives and what their focus is in terms of hero worship.

So, I’ve come through that storm of a semester to a point where I want to spend the first month learning from them what their needs, wants, and goals are. It starts with that day 1 assignment. Now that first assignment is the problem, because it becomes prescriptive. I dislike starting a semester with a prescriptive approach, because it instantly sets the tone of this being more of what they experienced in High School. In truth I prefer the gamification aspect of things, which argues that I should be playing a game on day one where the students figure out their own mini-profiles (Needs, Wants, Heroes, Goals) and then pair up with each other to form teams and those teams form a symbolic representation of those shared desires in terms of image and name and then produce that for the class and present it.

Yeah… That might be it.

Here is the cold truth: The Giants have a serious culture and leadership problem in the locker room. I can see it from the sideline images. I can see it on the faces of the players who’ve lost game after game in consecutive seasons. They (as a fan I want to say we) are headed in the wrong direction.

Enter Joe Judge.

The guy has been a solid leader in the Patriots system for years and, apparently above others, gets the seal of approval from the legendary HC. This to me indicates that the guy is a leader. He is also a teacher–having earned a teaching degree. That tells me something as a teacher myself. It tells me he knows how to adapt to different personalities and he is presented with a great number of those in the Giants system.

So, will he be successful? Yeah. I think he will. I think the Giants faithful has to get behind a few things first.

1. We need a much better secondary. That has to happen now and has to happen through draft or through free agency. Defense needs to be a top priority.
2. We have some fat to trim on the O-line. We made mistakes in free agency (Solder) and those need to be corrected. There is money available now in FA with the departures of Manning and Jenkins, and while we will be spending a ton on the D-Line, we need to address the O-Line as well. The key there is agility. We need pass protection and pulling guards, because both work towards enhancing what Barkley can do.
3. Barkley is that dude. Not Jones. Jones is a fumbler and we gotta fix that too, but Barkley is the key to this offense. Some WRs are being developed very nicely (though one has had so many concussions that I think he should retire), but it comes back to needing to establish a strong run game first.
4. Hire an OC that understands point #3. Eric Bienemy didn’t get the HC role, but we really need that dude.
5. Stick with the Defensive Philosophy. If we switch D-Coord, we need to swap a lot of players. Give this thing an honest chance to work out.

That’s all. That’s the blueprint. It remains my dream job to be a NY Giants GM. I wish they’d call and let me help get this ship right. Heck, I’d take the Knicks job right now (call me, Dolan!). We need a quality NYC team. No, the Bills don’t count.