Author: admin

Tonight was the NBA draft, a time of great hope and opportunity–unless you’re a Heat or a Knicks fan in which you know, respectively, the GM gives little value to draft picks or know your team will trade away the player they draft just as that player gets good. I would be the latter. I watch the Knicks draft in order to see who is going to be good on someone else’s team. Ask Lebron about that one. He had two Knicks starters–starters from THIS SEASON on his squad at the finals…

The Knicks thing kicked in immediately as they traded away 2013’s #24 pick for this year’s #19. Goodbye Tim Hardaway Jr. You were just starting to get good. That makes three starting guards dumped by the Knicks in the past 8 months. The #19 pick wound up being another guard who will probably find his skill set properly exploited in another offense–maybe Phoenix.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Fans of the Wayward Pines books will be deeply disappointed by the TV show. There are too many reasons to list. I mean, the stuff is not nearly as tightly woven and on message as the book. They should’ve done better for a mini-series.

It is easy to identify the balance in a relationship and easier still to recognize it as it tips further in one direction or the other. I, for example, recognize that I tend to see Wednesdays as a maintenance day and a prep day for when the kids come back on Thursday morning. My goal is for them to walk into something new and spectacular, be it something I’ve upgraded, some magical experience I’ve prepared for them, or something so small as a new game (see previous post on spoiling). As I’ve been thinking about how to get centered and get more productive, the idea of that balance keeps staining the air around me like used cat liter. There is the realization that my relationship with the boys is not balanced but there is also the understanding that it cannot be completely balanced. We are after all father and sons and not partners.

So what then is the necessary balance? I think in all relationships there has to be a basic understanding of needs of and from all parties concerned. For me there is an inherent need to please, so a lot of this stuff I do can be self-gratifying. On the other hand I need to feel like the things I do for people are appreciated in a way that I recognize as appreciation. This is made difficult in a parental relationship (though perhaps no harder than in a marital one) because the kids don’t fully understand my expectations of appreciation unless I explain it to them.

There’s the rub and the crux of this blog. I can, with difficulty, wrap my head around the fact that my boys don’t know how to act unless I tell them how. Therefore I can, and apparently sometimes do, tell them how they need to behave in order for me to continue providing them with a gleeful existence. What I recognize now is that it is much harder for me to separate my expectations of understanding from my grown up relationships. I don’t think I’m alone. I’ve heard far too often the term ‘he/she should know’ That term speaks to an inherent philosophy that one party has in some way intuited or even straight up told the other about desires and needs so much that the other party has ingrained this into their psyche. Unfortunately, this is often NOT the case.

I fear many relationships are torn apart by a failure to communicate and if we could all just reiterate what we want and need–without getting angry or defensive about the need to reiterate–a lot more relationships would be happy ones.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. A friend identified Banshee as male chick lit. I really like that term. It ought to be publicized…
2. 1876 (yes I’m back to that if only briefly) was the year of the famous Indian Head penny. It was also the year of the battle at little big horn. This feels important as we are considering putting a woman on the $10 in the same breath as we are rolling back abortion rights and continue to have less than equal wages.

Fatigue has been kicking in hard core over the past few days. I think the time for good sleep is nigh. I’m not totally abandoning my previous assertion about how little sleep I need, but on occasion it is nicer to get a full night of sleep.

Of course, I’m not advocating unlimited rest. That’s just crazy talk. Still, this fatigue has me slipping into a coma between words and that just isn’t a positive measure of writing. I think it is best if I go lay down after …

Some Thoughts:

1. Does it all really boil down to sex and power? Everything I read, see, hear, and often experience is about these two sources of ‘pleasure’. If I’m being honest, even sex is about power. We fight, kill, steal, lie, cheat, and even pray over power.

Today was a good day to reflect on creating balance in my life and learning how to be comfortable and satisfied within my own skin, condition, and station. Balance is a huge element I’ve sought to achieve in my life. Getting that right will permit me to go back to being the best possible me. I kinda like that dude.. Here are some more thoughts..

 

Some Thoughts:

1. For the past four days I’ve awoken or come home to find the door to the guest room open. Each time I’ve shut it only to find it open again the following day. It stopped being a coincidence after the second day. Sometimes the kids are at the house when it happens and sometimes they are not. I haven’t talked about this sort of thing for some time now, but sometimes talking about a thing gives it power. I closed it tonight. We will see if it stays that way.
2. @Alexmorgan13 Way to go today. You really took one for the team and the ladies were able to capitalize.
3. It is hard to coach a team when you don’t get a lot of kids showing up to practice and even games. My 10-12 put up their best effort yet this past weekend and we were short-handed. The difference? We had almost everyone at practice.
4. My son’s cat is stalking me…

My kids have Kindles. They have multiple video game systems, a game room and enjoy all the fun a group of boys could possibly enjoy. It isn’t enough. Not a week goes by that they don’t ask to download some new free Kindle game. I’ve rarely said no because, well, its free. Whats the harm? It turns out the harm is developing a sense of entitlement and a deeply spoiled nature to the boys. It has to stop.

I think the culprit is a mix of permissive behaviors and a genuine inability to balance the lifestyle of yesterday with the needs of modern life. I get that the last part sounds like total BS. I mean, do kids NEED to have a kindle or an Xbox 1 or any other gaming platform? Do they NEED to watch shows constantly and have their own Netflix streaming queues or any of it? Not really. Honestly, I think my boys would be well prepared for the future if all they had were stacks of books and a C++ coding environment. The problem: I want to give them a great childhood as well.

Great isn’t necessarily defined by what you have, but these things we do have are contributing to the greatness. The problem is that they take everything for granted. I don’t know that they’re even aware of how little most people have. I need to learn how to strike a balance between what I give them and what they appreciate. It might take some time.

Some Thoughts:

1. Judy Mozes, the wife of an Isreali politician, took me by surprise when she joked that Obama coffee is ‘black and weak’. It constantly surprises me when people who should know better than to promote racism and try to reap the benefits of such shameless promotion. We are reminded on a constant basis of the horrors of the holocaust and told again and again that it should never be repeated. Well, it starts with off-handed jokes based on purported racial superiority. It matters less that she apologized for being caught than it does that she publicly made the remarks in the first place.

Let me start by saying that I’m not against sleep. This is a perfectly good mode of living for many people. Cats like sleep. Dogs as well, and their enjoyment seems to stretch into a lifestyle as they age. Still, humans don’t quite need as much of it as many would have you believe. I mean, why sleep so darn much? I’ve read that human adults need anywhere between 6-9 hours of nightly sleep. I haven’t seen six hours since the oughts. Part of that has to do with having children. I’m certain there is a biological imperative coded somewhere that says once you hit a certain familial size your sleep need decreases in proportion with additional family members. In that theory the 19 and counting family just stays awake all the time. I mean, maybe. They never sleep on the show.

Then there’s the issue of sleeping hazards. I would sleepwalk as a kid, awaking to find myself on elevators and what not–sometimes even actively willing myself back to a restful state hoping I’d reawaken in a much better situation (I mean, what if the elevator got stuck and I woke up trapped in an elevator. I’d promptly lose my shit). There’s the matter of sleep paralysis. One can wake up with a total inability to move. At all… That’s a terrible situation to wind up in.

In the end I think it is best to limit one’s sleep to a manageable REM allowance. This means anywhere between 160 – 220 minutes. In other words, people can technically get what they need in under three hours. I’ve gone a few days averaging two hours of rest and I’m not dead yet.

Of course this could all be the ravings of a man who doesn’t and hasn’t slept a great deal in a great while, so there’s that.

I’m writing this post with a bandaged finger and a bandaged thumb, the unfortunate result of a lightsaber battle during which a padawan dumped a pile of clean laundry on the floor in order to get away from an attacking Sith lord. The Sith tried to save the laundry and wound up catching the hilt of the padawan’s lightsaber on the edges of his hands. The Sith’s nails, uncut and ragged, shattered at the base. Blood followed.

Then bandages.

This lightsaber battle was a physical manifestation of my id, lusting after the boyhood joys of clashing lightsabers. I’ve long manifested such ideas in my head as a giggling stick figure. Apparently I’m not alone. I took the boys to watch Inside Out, not expecting much more than a few glimpses of a cartoonized Lewis Black. It took me utterly by surprise with a fresh and, occasionally Buddhist, representation of how human emotions and memories utterly control human behavior. I think this is going to require two posts to really dig in there and uncover the reason why I loved it so much. I suppose it was partially time and place and the kids being with me, but this was also a fresh and original film that did a great job with the sub-characterizations of a young girl’s mind and tying a plot tightly around it.

Here’s the premise: We have a team of emotions living inside our head and managing our personalities. The emotions are Joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger–all based on basic psychology (that has be revisited and narrowed by some to include only four). In each person there is a ‘prime’ emotion that rules the rest. This story is about the relationship between the prime Joy and her counterpart sadness. The film is also about the idea of prime memories and how these key moments define our personalities. I agree with this for reasons to be discussed in a separate 10 minute experience.

Here is the summary: Go see it. Let go of expectation and enjoy the ride.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I cannot imagine working in a store where the primary product sold was underwear. What do you say to customers? How about an extra helping of drawers?

On Divorce:

It turns out the surface effects of my separation boil down to a few extra hours to get work done and the lingering effects of a semester’s worth of sometimes nasty gossip. It wasn’t until I started having real conversations with the some of the people who heard the gossip or ended up the targets of it that I realized what sort of image I’d crafted for myself and how quickly that came apart at the first sign of my personal struggles.

So where am I now? I’m living deep below the surface effects and swimming around in a different kind of happiness. I know that things are still hard and I’m still learning how to be a single dad (for as long as I have to) but I also know that the learning has made me a better dad and a much better man. I’ve stopped seeking approval from all but a handful of people that truly matter in my life. With that sense of self assuredness, things can only get better.

On Race:

The boy with the bowl cut wanted to kill black people. I knew it yesterday–felt it in my gut–but I didn’t want to close the book on it until I heard (at least second hand) what he’d said his motives were. It’s simple: He wanted to kill black people. He laid charges at the feet of an entire race of people that included rape and thievery and the destruction of the American way of life. Basically, the dude said about blacks what Trump said about the entire nation of Mexico. One took action with bullets and the other with a presidential bid.

He’ll be tried and convicted and, for some, heralded. This will not end with one shooting. On the surface that ought to be the last touch of violence but it pulled back the curtain a bit more and revealed a good deal of struggle we all must go through as Americans in order to present a united front.

Apparently race is back in the spotlight again. Today a 20 yr old white male stormed the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charlston, SC and opened fire, killing multiple people. The cause of the shooting is unknown and the suspect is still at large, so all I can do is speculate. The easiest thing to do is to call it racially motivated. That says a lot about where my mind has moved towards over the past decade or two. I spent a long stretch avoiding making race the default cause of negative actions. I even boned up on my social-psychology as a way to better understand the role of race in individual and group thinking. It led me to understand strain theory as an explanation for a good deal of inner-city ideology and resultant behaviors, and inside and viewer expectations. Still, little of this can explain why a dude would walk into a church and light the place up.

Maybe I’m sensitive to this because my boys recently became churchgoers. Maybe its something else entirely–empathy perhaps. This story will develop over time, should the news find a salacious angle to sell it. What info I have comes from CNN. Fox news had something, but I had to dig past their assertion that Iraq is the new U.S. quagmire caused by Obama (Really, Fox? Really?).

This could be a lone wolf incident–an isolated shooting caused by any number of factors. Then again, it could be something else entirely.

I read an article entitled, ‘Dolezal has a right to be black‘ and grew ill immediately after reading the title. Lets not forget for a minute that people are going to seize on this very isolated incident and carve from it a national trend about race. I mean, sure it was CNN, but not everyone views them in as low regard as I do. Some folks tend to take their opinion page with less salt. So, why does she have a right? It’s the family, of course.

Today my mid kid announced that he is a black man. It took me so much by surprise that I giggled. He’s black, yes, but he is also Laotian and rarely wraps both arms around his asian heritage. By blood he can be called both but opts to be named one vs. the other. I have a number of friends who come from mixed backgrounds and forge strong identities in one direction or the other. Often those identities call for the abandonment of another racial identity. More often than not that abandonment is intrinsically linked with the parent they most resent. You have a mexican and a white parent and you really don’t vibe with the white parent, you might call yourself a mexican. This is not the case for my son. Calling himself black in that particular context was a convenient way to end the argument (I wish I could remember more of what started the argument). Still, for many people, finding a racial identity is key to figuring out who you are, and how you come by that identity is also key.

This is not what the CNN article tackled. No, they went ‘full retard‘ and openly compared what this lady did to the Catelyn Jenner situation, claiming the one real difference was deception. Whereas Jenner was honest about the transformation, Dolezal lied. Yeah, because that is the contrast that clears everything up.

Look, she was in a family where multiple adopted siblings were black. She married a black man and had mixed children. At some point it became convenient for her to simply be black. At some point after that she became popular and rode that wave to positions of power. She honed this identity in the same way all of us hone a professional identity hoping that it never cracks and we continue finding ways to be the person our coworkers apparently want and expect us to be. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out for her.

It never does.

Some thoughts:

1. Big shout to Golden State on the win and the title. The series lived up to the hype. I cannot help but thinking that if the Cavs had Kyrie and or Love this would’ve been a Cavs championship.