Author: admin

I spent the last week in DC, a stone’s throw away from my home in NYC. Though I didn’t go back, a piece of the city came to me in the form of my mother. She brought me a small treasure trove of memories dating all the way back to 1986. The items she brought helped sprinkle a smile on my face and served as a reminder that though we are not static beings, we are informed by our histories. As a result I’m taking these ten minutes to reflect on DC.

I went to the nation’s capital in order to attend the National Conference for Teachers of English (NCTE) and the young adult author’s workshop after (ALAN). From top to bottom the affair was a clash of social cultures and the coming together of a professional culture–the reader and teacher culture. Over time I’ve learned to mitigate my expectations about conferences. Often you get a lot of presenters rehashing ideas that have been around for a real long time but never formally published or presented, because the people applying the ideas prior to the publishers always viewed them as common sense.

Above all else I learned that nothing in common sense. If I have a really good and simple idea I ought to publish it and try to get on with one of these conventions. Likewise I learned that the people paid to speak at such things often do so for exorbitant fees or personal gain. Keynotes are exorbitant fee breeds, but writers and other ‘in the trenches’ folks are doing it for personal gain–usually for sales.

Some Thoughts:

1. Slow and sleepy night after hours on the plane.

I’m thinking in fragments again. I’ve found this to be an extremely important phase of the writing cycle. Once fragmented I find a well of wonderful ideas—threads—in need of being explored. This is a foundational point in the cycle. This is where ideas are born. The following ten minutes is a free flowing exploration of those thoughts. More may come of it later. I may build characters from these ideas. I may change my mind on stories or political movements. I may just express things that are weighing down my psyche. The truth is, this is really just an opportunity to be free and creative. I think everyone deserves 10 minutes of that.

 

1. I think I want to go to black Friday this year. I want to experience it from a different perspective. I want to go places that aren’t Walmart and see who comes out and how they act and what they buy (as opposed to what is presumed to be important by the sellers).
2. Yesterday I watched the Giants O-Line get their stuff together and look amazing. Then folks got hurt (this happens all the time. Get new trainers. Seriously) and they fell apart. The G-men lost and I was uplifted by the defeat, because I know what they can be every week when the folks are healthy. They might be Giants if healthy. This is unlike the Cardinals who can be incredible even when on the 3^rd string. That’s all about the coaching and the management.
3. Had occasion to reflect on my feelings about transgender and homosexuality today. I was proud of myself to be at a place where I recognize that I can see a person and not judge them because their views on sex and sexuality. Then I recognized that I am quite closed off to people who don’t accept homosexuality and transgender. In other words, If people have expectations on other people that I find personally reprehensible, I am not good at coming to the table with those people and accepting their views. I do it and I try to understand it but struggle to appreciate it. This comes from being a minority and experiencing discrimination and recognizing the struggles that people who aren’t doing ‘the mainstream thing’ or ‘aren’t like the majority’ have. I have more compassion for those who are having the courage to be different than I do for those who are working to keep the ‘different’ isolated and oppressed. That makes me a different kind of bigot, and maybe I’m okay with that.

I haven’t had significant internet access since Thursday night. What should seem like a relatively minor thing to someone born before the internet was created, is actually a really big deal. Take the blog for instance. Here I am uploading three days worth in one day and feeling terribly guilty about it. I also feel less aware about what is going on in the world. I mean I could’ve picked up a newspaper and read something, but the ubiquity of network access has me trained to not only go to the net for news, but to read news in a whole new way.

News on the net is everywhere. I used to write a lot about how the internet allows you to experience the type of news that you decide you want to read or hear. This remains true and I likely do the same thing. I’ll cruise through Digg and CNN and BBC combing for angles on popular stories that tell me the writer did more than ‘mockingjay’ the person who first published on the topic. I’ll also pop open a new tab and go spelunking for more info on the topic and sometimes the writer. This is the beauty of the web—the story doesn’t have to end with the end of the article.

This is the curse of the web—without access to it, the world seems much more two dimensional in terms of information access. I suppose I could watch TV, but I’m not a fan of TV news. I suppose I could rock my phone for internet, but I do so much with music on that platform that I’m afraid of going over my plan limit and paying exorbitant fees.

So finally I was able to get a fairly stable net connection out of my room and I’ve been sitting here through the 5:30 midpoint hacking away at this blog and salivating about the good stuff I’m (hopefully) about to see on the web.

Good webhunting!

Disclaimer: I am a conspiracy theorist, so sometimes my ruminations will take me so deep down the rabbit hole that I have no idea how to crawl back out. For example, when I woke up this morning my web page was open to a CNN front page article about Adam Lanza. This is in the wake of the Florida State Library shooting, and tried to bring attention to the clear connection between mental deficiency and school shootings. My mind, on the other hand, started thinking about how the Lanza case tends to pop up every time people talk about guns in relation to a shooting, but disappears immediately after. I flash back to the work my students did on their ‘mythbuster’ papers and how one set of kids tried to convince me that the Lanza story was a complete fabrication and, for just a moment, I say hmm…

This piece isn’t about that possible hoax. This is about the ‘hoax’ of No Shave November (NSN). I haven’t shaved since the month started and my beard is about to where it can possibly be—which isn’t much. I don’t know think it looks very good. In truth I think the beard makes me look lazy, which is where the hoax comes in.

When I started the NSN, I wondered about my motivations. I only shave twice a month or so, and not having to do it at all felt like another thing being taken off my plate. It did not feel like I was giving something up or working particularly hard to bring attention to any issue or situation. Instead I was left with the impression that this whole thing is actually designed to let dudes off the hook of their responsibilities. Maybe it is. Maybe the whole thing is about the hair itself and when you see the men who haven’t shaved you’re supposed to connect the idea of cancer awareness to those men. I.e. These dudes are hip and real and do what they can to get the message out about prostate cancer. In contrast, the shaved men are not any of those things and or don’t give a dang. Only the shaved men outnumber the bearded few by a horrific scale. In other words, the message isn’t getting out there the way it should and is partly resulting in making us ‘not-so-long beards’ look really lazy.

I think Wednesday morning represented some kind of invisible line; a turn which once I’d made I could never come back from. I was sitting in class with a slew of much younger people and talking about vaping. Up until that point I hadn’t quite seen the parallels between my youth and their own. I was raised in an era where cigarettes were slowly fading into the realm of the unclean. Here now is a student vaping in the middle of class and presuming that it is totally okay.

Vaping is the new form of smoking. It is the term applied to people smoking vapor cigarettes. As I understand it a cartridge of nicotine is loaded into a water solution and processed through a small pipe or cigarette like device that permits you to exhale ‘harmless’ vapors into the air. This is so new that many locations (including my college) don’t have rules in place governing where you can or cannot smoke. As a result students are smoking that stuff in class without the slightest concern for whether or not it is disruptive to the environment.

It isn’t disruptive, really, but it is rather weird and difficult to comprehend in the context of my own personal history. That’s the turn I speak of. Growing up in an era where smoking was so heavily criticized it is foreign to recognize that I live in an era where a form of smoking is about to take off and start the cycle all over again. In a sense, history is repeating itself and I am at once the holdover codger of a bygone era struggling to recognize a world that no longer makes sense to me.

Or I’m just being a melodramatic talislegger talking about a relatively small-scale phenomena and equating it to a much broader cultural shift. You be the judge.

For a number of reasons–most of which I’m not prepared to get into right now–this has been an extremely challenging semester. The challenges don’t stop at the classroom door. They crawl inside and back outside and into my home and through my brain and extend through my body like a white hot stress projectile. That being said, I’m a stronger person for making it this far and not falling completely over (or quitting everything). Now we are in the last gasping weeks of the semester, where students are angling for grades and teachers angling for the freedom of a short winter recess. I’m looking forward to getting back with the boys and hanging out and running and trying, together, to work back into some sort of decent shape. I’m not going to do anything overzealous like set a 40 lb goal. I’m going to take advice from a close friend and try to move towards a more holistic approach to exercise.

I carry my stress in my belly. My belly fat to be specific. I eat my pain, and according to the scale I’ve eaten quite a bit of it over the last year. Reversing that trend means learning to make better eating choices, finding the will and the time to exercise, and putting myself on a schedule–even if it is one that allows for a large chunk of unscheduled time. I was using the Jawbone UP for that purpose until I lost mine on a road trip. I’m not sure if I want to spend the $150 on a new one. Towards the end there it was starting to look like wear and tear had gotten the better of it. For the money I spend I can find a new way to wake up in the morning and to know when I’ve been sitting still too long.

I have been sitting still too long–especially in non physical ways. I’m looking for ways to be less stagnant and to grow as a person. I’m terrified of becoming someone who is closed off and afraid to learn from new experiences and new people. Basically, I’m afraid of becoming an old codger at 40.

The blog is a good example of stagnancy. It has not been very good for a while. That deep well of energy and creativity I once drew ideas from has shifted out of view and I’m looking for it or something like it to allow me to connect to the ethereal yet again. Be patient if you can. I’m trying.

Here’s a new one. I deleted the original post by accident. I don’t know how and it is quite befuddling. It sucks, actually. So here are some basic (angry) picks.

 

OAK over KC

CLE over ATL

NYJ over BUF

TB over CHI

HOU over CIN

IND over JAX

GB over MIN

NE over DET

PHI over TEN

SD over STL

SEA over AZ

DEN over MIA

SF over WAS

NYG over DAL

BAL over NO

 

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Sorry for a weak post. It is hard to bounce back from losing something–even ten minutes of something.

I’ve long hated the twilight series. Loathe is the word best to describe my general tenor towards that writing. I loathe it because of the fans it gets and the copies it sells and the millions the writer makes off of it. I loathe it the way a kid hates his friend’s shiny new PS4–because he doesn’t have one. I consider the writing and think, ‘I could’ve done much better. I could’ve told a better story with more developed characters’. Then, I take a deep breath, exhale, and decide that I’m completely wrong. Sure I could’ve written something along the lines of Twilight, but I could not ever have written that book because of the way I was taught, and the stuff I read. I would’ve written the version of Twilight that didn’t sell and didn’t reach so many people and compel them to read.

Twilight is not Faulkner. It isn’t the lost works of any dead white guy or Ellison or Neruda in long form or any of that. Twilight is a fun trip into the mind of teenage girl who is being pursued by incredible men. In that lives the stories simple pleasure. In that lives the reason why it is so compelling. So many of us want to be wanted by others and stepping in the shoes of Bella allows us to be wanted and to imagine what we would do in a similar situation. Because she is little more than a shell character, it is very easy for a multitude of readers to impose their own ideas upon her and in that become her. I submit that the same holds true for the actress who plays her in movies. All this Team Edward vs. Team (whoever) crap is merely an extension of the basic premise of choice. The followers of one team are only there because that is the team they would chose had they been given the choice themselves. There is the beauty of reading–the freedom to choose and in that choice extrapolate a meaning for the book that the author might not have ever intended.

So, I write this to say thanks to Bella and all of the published characters that bring more readers into the fold. I’ve much enjoyed the chance to watch new readers grow and learn and it is an experience I won’t soon forget.

Its no secret that I’ve been a missing man in my professional life this semester. It didn’t catch my attention so much as it did when the Black History Month planning committee put out an email and I wasn’t on the mailing list. I’ve been really gone, man. I pulled a Ralph Ellison. I pulled a John Cena–you can’t see me on my campus. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. For anyone to continue performing at the level I was for a sustained period there needs to be a significant break period, or recharge, with the singular goal of giving the worker a chance to step away from the level of responsibility and expectation in order to renew a sense of vigor.

Economists talk about the 80/20 rule, in which 80% of the work tends to be completed by 20% of the people. This winds up being true of most work situations (and beyond!). I tend to be a twenty percenter. It takes a toll. Moreover it surprises people when you pull back and do less. It feels like suddenly you’re doing nothing. Doesn’t feel that way to me of course. I’m writing a novel, amongst other projects, coaching multiple football teams, teaching/learning, and teaching all kinds of stuff.

Still, I did-am doing less.

This minivacation of sorts renews me and fills me with that sense of professional urgency that has been lacking as of late. In other words, I’m just about ready to remind the world why I rock.

I just about believe I do again.

Taking a break from Bob today. It has been that kind of day overall. I’m tired and more than a little drained. I’ve had some time to reflect about perceptions, about the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, happiness and satisfaction. All of this swirling around my life like an unwanted halo. I’m constantly drawn to the Steinbeck quote:

“when I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” John Steinbeck

It applies to how some people live life and, in many ways, the way I’ve contemplated living life. This isn’t necessarily a happy development. As my mother in law put it, ‘You think you’re happy with the choices you make but then you’re only happy 20% of the time. The other 80% is sadness.’ Without trying to sound like a person who is morbidly depressed (which I’m not, btw) I can explain that I’m someone who is at a crossroads in life. I’m still trying to figure out the best path to happiness.

People can be happy in a number of ways and for me it comes down to figuring out the things that make me least happy and eliminating them from my life. Afterwards I can start to think beyond the next day and regain the perspective of a long and satisfying life plan.

A lot of this sounds like a jumbled mess today. That’s probably why this is one of those blogs that won’t be sold…