Author: admin

Tevan Wright hated his name. He supposed it could’ve been worse. Most of the kids he knew from the block had even more exotic names like J’quan and Kennidie. That last one felt more like a misspelling than an actual choice. He’d recently confirmed that when he asked her mother why she chose the name and she said, “I wanted to name my girl after the greatest president I’ve ever known.” His own mother was party to such gaffes. She liked to tell him she named him after the love of her life, a 90’s R&B singer that looked more ‘black boy band’ than what he thought of as R&B. Anyhow, that man’s name was Tevin, a clever bastardization of Kevin, he supposed. Whatever the root, his own name sprouted from it a very unintelligent way.

 

Which is why he was changing his name to Tom. He stood deep in the queue at the Pinal County Courthouse pressed in close to people who stank of sweat and perfume. A hundred conversations in several different languages popped around him like chaffe. One stray question whistled his way and he acted like he didn’t hear it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the speaker, a tall woman who looked a decade younger than his mother. She was staring at him with round, friendly eyes. He looked away, grateful for the comfort of a hooded sweatshirt. She bumped him ans said, “Did you hear me, young man?”

 

Tevan hunched his shoulders and tried to disappear deeper into his hoodie but the lady bumped him again. He didn’t respond again so she bumped him again and this time she said, “Boy, don’t be rude.”

 

He wondered if it would be ruder to respond to her with exactly what he wanted to say, but his mother raised him well enough not to test those scales…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Started free writing this while waiting for a tire change. I don’t know what it is or where it is going but the story comes around at some point to a conversation with the boy’s mom about changing his name and her lying about how she feels about it. He knows because she smiles when she lies and frowns when she doesn’t. Something about that simple lie detector compelled me to start writing about Tevan/Tom. Maybe I’ll continue.

Almost forgot to blog it out tonight. Close call too. As I was wandering off to the land of dreams I realized that I hadn’t put finger to keyboard. I delayed it, because I was in a seriously bad mood. See, as I was driving around tonight I realized that I was driving on a flat tire. I couldn’t for the life of me figure why my car was tugging so hard to the right. Apparently it had its reasons. Those reasons being a flat tire. I’m pissed about the tire, but I am more pissed about the fact that it has become a common ploy to demand that people buy these things in two.

Snopes chimed in on the debate as did other sites, pointing at the concept of tread wear as a leading cause for why you need to purchase two tires vs. one. I feel like I need to purchase 1 in terms of cash on hand, and maybe go a week before I put the other new tire in play. It is a difficult situation to have to think in these dimensions, but I know the dudes at the tire spot are gonna give me hassle.

The fact is, I have gremlins.

These terrible things manifest yearly and cause me no end of pain. Well, there is an end, but it usually takes a few weeks to a month. I often like to say it is followed by a magical period of blessed luck, but that isn’t real. The gremlins, on the other hand, are quite real. I don’t know how to stop them or if they can even be stopped. All I know is that I need to be careful over the next few weeks (gosh, how long has it been going on already?). Who knows what is going to happen next?

I’ll be called a racist after this one. It won’t be the first time. In fact, people who are extremely close to me have dropped the R-word on me more than once. I think that is a huge misnomer. I also think that it often follows me pointing out racial realities such as what I’m laying out right now. Today my concern is the end of white expansionism and the effect that it having on the idea of whiteness, moving it from a position of ubiquity closer to the feeling one has when the walls are closing in on you.

To understand my position you have to first grasp the concept that ‘white’ was never intended to be a catch all phrase. It was never meant to induce a feeling of fear or conjure images of polo shirts and khakis. It was, on the other hand, intend to be a safe word. It was intended to be reflective of a higher class and a limited order of individuals. White was a refuge–a reflection of the ‘Us’ side of us vs. them. Black, in contrast, had a more specific delineation, which I plan to discuss in another post. I have numerous points of evidence to support this. Basically, White was something to be proud of while other cultural labels were not. In my time studying sociology this is one of the things I found to be really interesting and eye opening. However, in the ten minutes I have to put this out I have to rely on one well known and very simple piece of evidence: The Irish.

Irish was separate from White for a long time. It wasn’t until the middle of the 1900’s that Irish people became classified as white. Even then the joining was a response to the understanding that these groups (Irish, German, Polish, French, Dutch, etc. all shared a common bond, look, and enemy). The joining of forces created the white diaspora and helped the super group remain the dominant racial force in the American system of stratification.

Yep, American. We created this sense of whiteness in ways that were not common elsewhere. In fact, in pockets of our country being Jewish is considered white whereas it is not considered so in several other countries. While the idea of white is not a purely American construct, it is reinforced by the white American diaspora, often at the expense of cultural individuality. In other words, we reduce people to white, black, hispanic, etc. and in doing so ignore the individual cultural history that formed that subsection of people. All of this brings me (belatedly) to my point:

There really aren’t that many more sub groups to add to the white category. Meanwhile, a host of ‘non-white’ ethnic groups are sprouting up and demanding notice. The result? It creates the illusion that whitehood is under attack. Is it though? Is it really? Or is the growth of other groups suddenly clouding the skies with forms of understanding and awareness different from what we had become used to from this particular hegemony. Moreover that hegemony is disappearing, replaced by something that looks a lot more diverse. It is no wonder the idea of whiteness seems under attack.

 

Ten minutes on the clock. Here we go.

So the Giants epically pooped the bed. 27-7 is a near mirror of the 27-0 thrashing last year under the same ‘black out’ conditions in Philly. The difference this year is that the Philly team is not as good and the Giants team is better. Apparently just not better enough tonight. I had a fairly interesting time watching the game–highs and lows and every emotion available to the roller coaster. I suppose I am a tried and true G-Fan now. Not that I haven’t been on this roller coaster since the age of 6. I was born into a city of Giants fans and, at first, I took the oppositional approach. I liked the Jets. I liked the Mets as well, hoping to will them into good fortune. There were millions like me, who apparently accomplished their goals in the 80’s because the Mets were legit. The Jets, not so much.

The Mets are in a position now where they could make the World Series but the Cubs–yes the CUBS!–stand in their way. While I don’t care about baseball all that much, I do care about my team and my city getting the accolades of success. I think a lot of fans function in the same way, becoming fans in order to find unity with the place they live. In that way we forge a certain solidarity in fandom. It can, of course go too far, which is what we see in LA and SF most of the time…

 

Now I’m just rambling…

On occasion I find the hardest thing to do is to get started, especially in regards to things I really don’t enjoy doing. In this case, I don’t want to grade. I don’t want to grade ever again if possible. Of course, that isn’t possible, so here I am blogging about what it takes to pick up the red pen and go to work.

I’m talking about the concept of activation energy. In scientific terms, this is the minimum amount of energy needed to start a reaction. In human terms, this is the minimum amount of energy needed to do something–often something you’d rather not do. It takes considerably less energy to climb the stairs, power up the ps4, and start playing Call of Duty than it does to do a single page of homework. It takes far less energy to turn a TV on than it does to shut it off. This is, of course, all mental gymnastics. The key is that start. How much does it take to just start doing the task you don’t (or even do) want to do?

For me the key factor isn’t even necessarily laziness as much as it is desire. There are just a ton of things I don’t want to do in life. I build schedules to ensnare the things I don’t want to do, locking myself into the tasks in the process. People smarter about these things than I am call what I am talking about discipline. I suppose I try to create discipline within my life (though often with little success). I suppose I could do that quite a bit more.

If I could just figure out the right amount of energy needed to activate, I believe I would be able to build a reward system that helped give me the needed push in order to activate faster, more regularly, and without the apparently requisite level of bitching that goes with performing mundane tasks.

1. Still clearly in that lull/funk where I am not able to generate new ideas. It is like a flu for writers. Too much emotional conflict lately. I feel like there is this swirl of emotions connected to the non-logical portions of my life, including the kids and their activities. I did get to watch their teams all win today–first time this season. I like the way they feel after.
2. I do not like how they act. How is it that the more tired a kid gets the more they become evil.
3. Another night punching keys one by one in order to squeeze out something coherent.
4. Little luck at it this time.

Some days it is a struggle to decide what I want to write about.

A lot of that stems from the stress of having so much going on in my life. Between the kids’ sports and the job and the writing there is little space for the mental downtime in which ideas and aspirations are cultivated. This isn’t to say I don’t make time for such things, but I don’t make time to just sit back and think and reflect everyday. So, I wind up with these days where I don’t have a whole lot to say about anything. Instead I watch the clock dwindle slowly towards mediocrity and hope that tomorrow there will be more words.

I suppose that makes me a writer.

Some Thoughts:

1. Mets v. Cubs in the NLCS? Yeah, thats baseball worth watching.

I asked my eldest yesterday how many of his middle school friends had cell phones. He said, “All of them, daddy.” Somehow I was still surprised by the statement. It didn’t matter that the hallways of my college are filled with students not talking to each other, heads hung and eyes straining to see the world that lives behind a tiny screen. The ubiquity of the cellphone is real. Also real is the social disassociation that arises as a result of it.

Google ‘cell phones and social interaction’ and it will take you to a list of sites starting with an intelligent article by psychology today discussing how cell phones are changing human social interactions. People break up by text. It sounds like a joke but it isn’t. Also real is the fact that these devices provide another layer of insulation between people that is so compelling that individuals often actively ignore the live person standing right next to them in order to dive into a more-distant and virtual relationship.

No point in asking why. It is a lot easier to deal with someone in a time frame that allows you to consider and reflect upon your responses than it is to deal with people in real time. Likewise, tone in texts can be manufactured or obscured at your whim. It is much harder to hide the body language tells of tone in a face to face interaction.

The psychology of cell phones fascinates me to no end, and I want to have more time in my life to study it. I can say this: The way we interact with each other in public spaces is changing for the more distant. We are becoming less and less comfortable with interacting with people who aren’t our close friends. As a result I feel people are becoming more isolated and less diverse.

It is a problem that needs to be studied, or at least considered sooner rather than later.

 

I think I might be part of a dying species.

I say this with the understanding that I may have already written about this previously, but the idea lives in my mind and seems to explain so many differences between the generation I was raised in and the one in which I am raising my children. I will start by staying that I was born in the age of Atari. I played pong when it came out. I remember my many phone conversations being centered around the kitchen wall where the phone lived, my orbit determined by just how far I could stretch the cord. I remember school being about memorization, procedural understanding, and depth of knowledge. I remember when kilobytes were a big deal.

I am no Luddite. I can program in multiple languages (some of which are outdated by now), and strip and build a computer the way military folk breakdown a rifle. Still, I come from an era where I thought about such things very differently. I come from an era where information was internalized and commoditized, where if you did not know something, you simply did not know it and had to locate someone who did or otherwise locate a library or similar location where that knowledge could be slowly absorbed.

Consider that world I am talking about. People knew things and studied them often to the point of at least a degree of specialization. Bob knows how to do X, I know how to do Y and together we can develop Z. We collaborated out of necessity, because carrying multiple forms of knowledge and multiple skillsets was a rare thing.

Today’s world is not at all about what you know. If I ask (or have) a question about anything I can run to the web for the published (and polished) response. I don’t have to be a portable internal library of information, because the portable library is sitting in my pocket, and it makes phone calls too! As a result, the type of knowledge this new species needs is about access and application. We are no longer expecting people to recite Shakespeare verbatim, but to know how to find any line of any given play and interpret that line in a way that is reflective of our needs at that moment.

 

Somehow I have to raise the new species and teach them along the way.

I guess the ‘next man up’ philosophy is still intact in Buffalo. EJ Manuel is next up at QB, and we don’t have a clue what the RB situation is there. I feel for Rex Ryan. The dude cannot catch a break anywhere. Still, he’s been doing fairly well this season under heavy duress. The win his team pulled out last week was on par with what the Giants managed to do that same day. Both teams are moving, inexorably, in the right direction. It is no surprise how I see the NY teams then and no surprise that my Waiver picks target EJ as a QB (if you need one). He’s going to rely on his legs and his short routes, with maybe or shot or two downfield. The key: let the talent around you get open in space. Of course, it would help to know who that talent is…

On to the picks!

NO over ATL
The Falcons are heading into a buzz saw of a home game. I see a lot of scoring here, but in the end the Saints will slow Julio Jones enough to pull out a win.

Jets over Redskins
This is a trap game, but I think the last one served its purpose well. The Jets are now very awake and their #2, Eric Decker, is going to bring down the house.

PIT over AZ
The Cards are very good this year, but this is a home game and the Steelers run game at home will not be denied.

Vikings over Chiefs
Not enough weapons left for the Chiefs to be competitive. The whole offense hinges on one player. I know what that looks like from personal experience. Once that player goes down, the rest of the plan goes to poo. Next man up hasn’t been a thing in KC for a long time.

Bills over Bengals
This is a tough NY pick. The toughest ever. Everything I know says not to pick these guys, especially after the Bengals mopped up Seattle. Still, I think the weaknesses the Bills have are in the areas where the Bengals aren’t strong anyhow.

Bears over Lions
Defense is going to be a problem for both sides. The Bears need this win and I think the momentum from last week carries them through this week.

Broncos over Browns
I don’t think Peyton is comfortable in the offense yet, but I think the D is playing well enough to make this thing work. I also believe the Browns run D isn’t much to look at and the Broncos will exploit that greatly.

Texans over Jaguars
I think the Texans D finally gets on track this week and they do some serious damage against a Jags team that is finally starting to come around as well. I believe this so much that I am streaming their defense.

Titans over Dolphins
Dolphins in too much flux.

Seahawks over Panthers
Packers over Chargers
Ravens over 49rs
Colts over Patriots
Giants over Eagles