Author: admin

New routine: Coffee, write.

I woke up this morning thinking about the differences between reality and fantasy. I recently finished my second go-round of ready player one, and found that the story was still as enjoyable as my first read. It was also more meaningful, probably because of where I am at in life. There is a certain comfort in knowing that the doldrums of the real world are only one possible option. Though the book’s message is that there needs to be a balance and that at the core of fantasy there is a small piece of reality, I am comforted by a certain level of escapism.

It is Madden season. So for at least two days a week I’m going to sit at home and play. I have that brief window of freedom to slip away from the real world and focus on a world where I have some modicum of control of how things turn out. I suppose that is one of the basic appeals of being a writer as well.

Yes, games and fantasy are often a refuge of those who aren’t able to find happiness in the real world. I’ve come around to a certain level of acceptance of that. In truth I’ve adopted a life plan that allows for that. I’m looking to by a small place with high speed internet and low overhead. The extra money I have I can use to travel–should I choose to do so.

I suppose that is the last real debate in all of this. Travel is something that is inherently (and publicly) designed for two. Traveling solo–especially to foreign lands–is so completely isolationist as to become more difficult to deal with emotionally. So, we will see about all that.

Some Thoughts:

1. I don’t think I am going to write another novel. I don’t know that I will write another story either. The blog will continue indefinitely. I need to come to the page each day just to give myself something–to feel in some small way like a writer–but I don’t want to tell stories anymore.

It is tough to imagine a future–I mean a long term future–when you can’t even say where you will be living by this time next year. My partner has been dealing with this for a couple of years now and I’ve watched it wear on her, affecting her relationships and even her outlook on life. I have not been at it quite as long, but I do recognize when things in my life are out of my control and when other things are coming to an end. I’ll be moving over the summer to… somewhere else. It looks like I’ll still be renting by then, unless I can get both my credit and savings moving faster towards the direction they need to be in order to get me into a new home. Where that home will be is still largely a crapshoot. I know a prevailing need is to keep my kids in their school. The youngest two just transitioned to new schools. The big guy is headed to High School next year, so we still have a lot to figure out there.

One thing I am trying to do for myself is to stay on top of things. This is especially true of school, because that job responsibility is often the biggest part of my day. I finally created an ideal schedule that allows me to do that, but the rest is up to me. See, in my mind, if I can stay on top of an extremely hectic job like mine then I can make the rest work.

I know the connection there is limited at best, but we are talking about how I think. I think that little victories add up to big ones and build the confidence to make the impossible possible. Right now, if I am willing to be honest with myself, maintaining my lifestyle seems impossible. Juggling my responsibilities seems impossible. Living a better life seems impossible. Holding on to my partner seems impossible. Staying on top of the school stuff seems possible. If I can just do that, then maybe I can start to believe in the rest.

I’m considering the Athena template for web use right now. Not for this site. No, I’ve basically tabled the conversation on how to make this site sing. I have other sites I work with–mostly fun wheeling stuff like the houseofbeys beyblade site for the kids and a school site I cooked up for honors students. It is the latter that seems perfect for the Athena format. The more I study Athena, the more I recognize that it is the only ‘issue driven’ format I’ve used. The price is steep–$50, but is actually cheaper than what I spent on a suite of site templates that all ended up looking exactly the same (see houseofbeys.com) and offer very little in terms of design flexibility or user friendliness.

Odd that I rolled out of bed thinking about web design, but there are days where my mind is nothing but work work work. Usually its Thursday, because that marks the effective end of my teaching week.

Some Thoughts:

1. 5 minutes into the blog I ran out of stuff to say about the web. So, here we are finding 5 minutes more of stuff to write about.
2. We can start with the total inability to sleep. It has gotten worse over the past month, shifting from unable to get myself down to the sleep itself having very little value. I wake up with a sore neck every morning.
3. When I do wake up it launches me straight into the debate of whether or not I ought to go to breakfast. I used to catch a meal at Village Inn, but I haven’t been in so long that it would feel weird to go back. It’s the same narrative that formed at The Southern Rail where I used to go every Monday.
4. At some point I will blog about how I spend my time. Poorly. The answer is poorly.

Every month or so I have a brief conversation with myself. I sit down in silence and ponder the question, ‘Are you happy?’ Lately the answer is no. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I remain utterly unsettled. I can’t play the ‘where will you be in 5 years’ game and know where I’ll be living, who I will be with, or if I’ll even have the same job or a job at all. This is far too much uncertainty to be really happy with my life, so I’ve adopted a different type of thinking: Be in the moment. It works, temporarily, but the idea of ‘what next’ wanders through my consciousness every so often and the whole sad and difficult routine starts over again.

The moment is good. I spend a lot of my time with the love of my life. The rest of m time is spent playing with my kids, watching the shows I love most, writing, and coaching football. All of these phases of my day are moments of joy. Even now at the start of a new teaching semester everything feels amazing and promising and I want nothing more than to be in that classroom getting to know my learners.

Pull the frame back a bit and the picture looses focus. My relationship is totally undefined. My time with my kids is completely scheduled to the point where we have almost no free time. I’m watching shows to avoid the fact that my creativity engine is effectively stalled, and every day I spend at football practice I get the sensation that the head coach is going to bail and leave me this team and zero assistants. The teaching? I love my students, but I feel completely isolated on my campus. I feel like a ghost where a handful of people enjoy the haunt and the rest are lining up exorcists. In truth I think they’ve found the one loophole that could banish me from tenure.

Perhaps that is why I stay in the moment. Anything further down the path is too bleak at this point.

I had a really melodramatic post planned about how the beam–the eclipse–bisects my life, separating the man I was from the man I am and blah blah blah, but that isn’t true. It is definitely an example of where I am in life vs. where I want to be. I’m not anywhere along the path as I should be. I’m not celebrating the event with friends, because I don’t really have people in proximity who care about it as I do. I am not going to a public viewing because I don’t particularly care to be around people I don’t know. I am not going to a work viewing because that place doesn’t feel like home or like a safe space anymore.

I will say this: The big moments are when you pause to take stock of where you are at and consider how you feel about your place in the world. This morning I woke up to a large and empty house and recognized that I wanted neither. The space only matters when you have voices to fill it.

I’m glad the eclipse gives me a moment to take stock of the now and consider what I’m looking for the next time such an event comes around. Further it gets me thinking about what events do matter and readying myself to plan for them.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I am not centered. There really is no way to avoid it. I lack a center and as a result there is nothing that really grounds me. I tried to make it my partner, but that really isn’t fair to her for me to build everything around her when she too is in flux. I ought to build everything around writing, but something holds me back from that as well.
2. So it begins. The semester starts the day of the eclipse. That has to mean something. Or not.
3. Still waking up in pain every morning. The pain extends from my neck down my back. I’m going to try new pillows to see if that helps.

There are moments in your life when you see all the choices you’ve made laid out for you, like the decision tree in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Each step builds on the last leading you, inexorably, towards dragging your body across the kitchen floor at 1 AM on a Sunday morning. For me the chain of events started not with a birth but with the first back drama. I cast my memories back to the day, a few years ago, when my back was out and my partner was there to help me heal. Fast forward and my partner is on her own journey along the beam awaiting the coming eclipse and I am alone and in pain on the carpet. Every step from A to B was the result of my own actions and serve as a real wake up call to remind me that choices have lasting consequences and neglect can ultimately destroy everything you are trying to become.

I’ve long been the sort of person who fails to put on bug spray because mosquitos don’t seem like a big deal out here, only to be the fool scratching up and down his legs a day later. That is to say I am the worst boy scout ever. Though it is totally within my means to be prepared, I often approach life with the thoughtlessness that leaves me both clearly prepared and unable to act on the preparedness.

I bought a backboard specifically to help me stretch out my back and get it (and me) in better shape. I used it roughly a dozen times before it became a pants rack. Prepared, but failed to execute on the preparedness.

I bought and studied over 50 books on the writing process only to use nothing from them in the actual teaching of writing.

I can name half a dozen aspects of my life in which this is true–especially in love. It all points back to an infernal laziness or lack of will to execute anything in the mid term. I do well short term. I fail at mid term. In the long term, it adds up to an ultimate fail, which is why I found myself on the floor alone at 1 AM writhing in pain. It is where I stayed until 4 AM when I managed to get up and get myself to bed. I’m up again now and basically mobile. The pain is still there, as is the understanding of why it is. That’s what this blog is about after all.

I can count on one hand the number of Saturdays I have till football. That means there are only a handful of days I get to spend with my kids that aren’t dominated by sports. In that time I desire to go to the lake and down to the caves, really putting in some quality outdoor time. I haven’t scheduled any of this out or even figured how to make it a reality, but it is what I want to do. I want to strike a balance where it isn’t always rush rush rush in our lives. This week taught me that too much of something can be a real problem. Right now I have a kid who has two practices a day three days a week and practice at least once a day m-f. This is how it is for him through October. Did I mention he’s just moved into middle school and is learning to engage academically?

Kids aside, I am entering a year where I finally have a schedule that is conducive to life outside of work. Ideally, I can work from home multiple days or spend a wealth of time with my partner. Ideally doesn’t always work out for us, but that remains to be seen. Regardless, I made a decision recently that the universe can very much kiss my grits. In a lot of ways.  In regards to this it confirms that I am going to stand by this relationship and do everything in my power to make it work (whatever it is).

I think that about covers it. I didn’t mention writing because there isn’t anything to mention yet. There will be soon enough…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The Giant beyblade stadium: not a hit. The metal surface doesn’t perform nearly as well as the plexiglass. This leads to slower battles and less joy. I feel like the next step is to get a coating to spray on the stadium to make it smooth. I do not know such a thing exists, so in the meanwhile we have what we have.

I’ve had a lot going on this week and have run myself fairly ragged. There is a sickness going around the kids’ school and they brought that stuff home. In addition I’ve been trying to strike a fine balance between me time and everything else. It has resulted in forgetting to do a number of things… Such as being able to think in terms longer than…

Some Thoughts:

1. In a classic ‘What did I just get myself into?’ moment I find my mid kid playing mid-school soccer m-th and club football t, th, F. In other words, the t/th practices completely overlap. This is going to be a problem since I coach @ 5:30 on T/Th and cannot begin to pick him up. So, I need to find him daily rides home from practice and tell his coaches he is going to miss half a practice every week.
2. Speaking of practice, I was supposed to bring another kid to practice and just realized I did not do that yesterday… I think he missed it. I really think he missed practice on account of me.
3. This is proof that this being a dad thing is overwhelming me. Just a little…
4. So now I am trying to devise a schedule where I don’t go insane as a single dad. So far, not good.
5. In other thoughts, the Defenders dropped on Netflix last night. I stayed up to watch the first episode and was, well, kinda disappointed. The combo story has all the positives of the shows I enjoy and all the negatives of the ones that suck, only the suck is leaking into the non-suck in a very obvious way. I thought the infection might go the other way. It hasn’t

The more I study and write about virtual realities, the more I realize the concept is not much different than social realities. While we of the physical space occupy the same world, that world looks and behaves very differently based on social circles and economic class. What we do and how we view the concept of ‘living’ shifts as you move through the various social circles. This applies not only to what we do in life but how we use our leisure time, and that leisure tends to serve as a connection point between the worlds, furthering the illusion that we exist in the same space at all.

Take the example of a football game. There are many levels to the sport overall and even to the naming of the game. For example, if I say football in Spain, I’m talking about the beautiful game, known here as soccer. However, if we are speaking the same language and are even at the same football game, the experience shifts based on the socio-economic world you live in. These delineation are clearly outlined on your ticket stub. For those living within the wold of NFL teams and players, you are likely on the field or in a protected skybox where the way you interact with the game is separate from the various, financially delineated ways in which the crowd interacts with the game. If you are a worker you are experiencing the game differently again. While all of these people are in the same stadium, the way they view that environment (and thusly the way others view them) shifts from social circle to social circle. This is identical to the virtual realms–especially in terms of MMORPG where you do have these huge gathering halls and the people in the spaces have various roles and as such view the space in different ways. Technically, they are in the same space, but the reality of that space is very different.

I’ve become more and more aware of this through interacting with parents at morning and afternoon pickup. We all drop our kids off at the same place–an intersection of our realities–but afterwards we fall back into very different lives. The gathering halls of the bus stop and the virtual adventuring halls are very much the same beast.

Some Thoughts:

1. Starting to stash away cash for a VR rig for the kids. This blog is brought to you by Talislegger’s heedless ambition for tech…
2. I’m falling back into another world too. The world of productivity.