Author: admin

I shared the 10 minute rule with some students today. Not the blog itself (as that would be egotistical) but the idea of it. These are all novel writing students who struggle with the words. The words don’t come fast enough. the words come too fast. There is no time to record them. There is no time to summon the writing. There is no time to write.

I asked them to take 10 minutes minimum out of each day and write. I know that for some this will be a challenge, as it was for me. For others it will be an opportunity to solidify that wealth of talent that lives within them. A chance to open the vault doors at let slip the tide of fiction. Or non fiction as the case may be.

I am struck by the abundance of words within them. I am struck by this as I struggle with the production of my own words yet again. As the walls of deadline loom before me and the 20th looks down with dark eyes I ask, How can I get the words? How indeed?

Perhaps I should stop self-sabotaging. I should put mind to work ahead of habit and distraction and call forth the working thoughts of a man who knows his craft and his skill and his depth of person and character before I, infinitely smaller than he, forget who he is, which is me, which is meant to be he again.

I am of course rambling incoherently. Sometimes such things are necessary to get the junk out before the goodness can flow freely. That and pancakes do a good writer make.

A smoother way to day it would be, overextended.
I am certain that this is a flaw of giving people, a flaw of intelligent people, and a flaw of egotistical people. I am one or more of those types of people and I wholly possess the flaw of overextension. The thing is, I believe I can accomplish everything and anything I set my mind to. However, I take on so much that I often limp through these accomplishments and in that downgrade the opinion that others hold of me.

Here are the facts: I am teaching 7 classes this semester. I am also the Lead Faculty for developmental education. I am also the faculty liaison for the writing center. I am also coaching two flag football teams and assistant coaching a baseball team. I am working on a novel. I am working on some writing for a video game. I am working on some writing for a role playing game. All of these things in addition to being a father and a husband who needs to find time to exercise, sleep, and otherwise take care of himself. Obviously, I am overextended. The problem is I am unwilling to give up any of the wonderful work I do. My answer has always been scheduling, but the scheduling fails to account for me time, and when I become overwhelmed, I allow the me time to dominate everything and the other stuff gets neglected.

Where is the balance? It lives in a place just outside of my reach right now. It languishes in a book or a Ted talk, or a therapists couch, somewhere I have yet to access. On the other hand, I look at some of the incredible people of our world and what they do and ask myself this: if they can do it, why can’t I?

Then I double down and put more on the plate.

Yesterday I talked about a girl, and afterwards watched a bit of The Butterfly Effect. That sensation she has at the end of the movie, that is what I feel from time to time. Right now I am feeling busy. Tired too. This may be the first night I sleep before 2 am in months. But this blog is not about burnout. This is about juggling the many lives one is made to juggle. For me there are 4.

The first life is the one that begins at 6 am with tears and yawns and was for breakfast. It rises with the sun and carries through the early morning. This is the life of fatherhood, where you are dad and coach, and provider of playtime glee. Where your body is reshaped into a jungle gym and your ears swell with peals of laughter. I love the life of a parent despite how hard it can be. I love the second life as well, the life that is introduced in a 30 minute stretch of blacktop and ferried into existence on a soundtrack of audiobooks and NPR. This is the work life. It is satisfying and fun. There are pointless political games and emotionally dangerous students, but these pitfalls are part of the life’s landscape. When I come home there is the 1st life again and it gives way to a third life–the life of a husband.

We don’t have many of these precious moments any longer. Between study and kids we can hardly sit down for more than a TV show or desperate quickie. This is the neglected life in some aspects, and it is the one that is meant to sustain me through the other 3.

The fourth life begins as her day ends. This is the solitary life. This is the writing life, where I come to the page each time as a newbie, hoping to carve something useful out of the tide of human experience and emotion we are all so fortunate to be a part of. This is the soul’s playtime.

I always enjoy this part.

I’m puzzled about this one. I’m in Lakeshore Learning with my middle kid and this lady walks in holding a baby. I’m staring. I’m struck. I’m frozen. She’s attractive, but that is not it. There is something chemical there. Something genetic and old like a familiarity that reaches back through time and grabs hold of me and shoves me into neutral. This could have been an hour or a split second, but she notices me and smiles. I smile. We both move on. I don’t really move on, because I cannot for the life of me understand what the hell that was. Fact is, I wasn’t even attracted to the woman in that way. I just felt like I knew her on some cellular level and there was a connection there.

I’ve felt that a few times in my life, mostly with females. It is a sense of kizmet that feels born from some past life. The first time I thought it was a relationship thing, but it isn’t that at all. I don’t know for sure what it is or how it intersects with my life. I know that it is weird, and confusing, and uncomfortable when it happens. The thing is, I don’t know what to do about it or how to control it.

I wonder how I look to other people. I know that in the weekend games I am one of the last picked and one of the most avoided offensive targets, often pushed off to play lineman. So in this case I am seen as as a scrub–especially given my inability to block. On the other hand, I am the smartest guy on the field (and not very humble) and I can learn any position they throw at me. An offensive guy all my life, I find that I play more and more defense ball with these guys and I’ve struggled.

But that is tangential. See, I know they feel like I am slow and old, but I only partially feel it. I want to record myself running routes, so I can see my speed and improve it. All the reading I do about the subject is useless if I don’t actually get out there and do some running. Who knows when? Heck, I can hardly find time to add new things to my plate. And time, as always, is running out.

I also wish I could see myself from the student perspective. Ratemyprofessor helps, but that is overwhelmingly negative. Maybe that is the whole story, but I feel like a lot of students do not have the desire to post unless angry, so while there is a lot of bad, there is little good and that is fine for the medium. I wonder how the coworkers view me, but there is hardly a way to tell there.

I suppose I can worry and wonder for all of my life, but I can never really know. So, what is the point of worrying?

Its funny how the choices you make keep coming round and again. In a way those choices are a reflection of who you are and come back because they are representative of what you will do again. The other day my Division Chair asked me if I planned on slowing down any time soon. I teach the maximum number of classes (counting overload hours), which means that I am working very hard to make ends meet in order to compensate for the lack of funding in the family. It also means that burnout is always only a heartbeat away.

I’m not there yet.

Maybe I’ll find some new and deeper strength from all of this. Maybe I am pushing my engine to the max in order to find yet another gear that I can rev up into. Maybe, just maybe, I have no idea how much I can take before utter and total collapse.

I’m looking forward to my kids’ flag football seasons.

I had an opportunity to run a full uniformed practice this thursday. The D played well and the offenses were crushing it. Interestingly enough I noticed how the D diagnosed the play after a few reps. This is probably going to happen in the game, which means I gotta throw in a few wrinkles like shotgun and ‘wing’ to keep them guessing. The plays are simple. Stopping them is a bit harder. The beauty of the option is that you don’t know what the QB or the RB is going to do. The QB could just pull it back and throw it. The RB can throw it too, or run it, or hand it off again. All of these plays went down during our game and it wound up looking great.

The 4-5’s gave me a burst of happiness today when I saw a kid I was unsure of suddenly emerge as a top flight runner. Kid has the moves and speed we’ll need to score. With only 9 players on the roster and 8 actually showing up, I can get the ball in the hands of one of our three solid runners every possession. Add in the handful of reasonable QBs the team has and we are looking at an offensive explosion.

Defense doesn’t look as good at the 4-5 level, but with the blitz figured out, we are going to be able to contain the other teams at the 8-9 level. This is going to be fun. Even in the 45 degree cold of the weekend, I am looking forward to a good time watching them play.

A pomodoro is a tomato. Such a simple object to reflect what is essentially distilled brilliance. Back in the 1980’s Francesco Cirillo developed a technique for time management structured around maximizing mental exertion by controlling the amount of time the mind is exerted. Cirillo’s technique was to work for 25 minutes and take a 5 minute break. Do this two (wikipedia says 4, but frak that) times in a row before taking an extended (30 minute) break. This helps the mind stay fresh and allows you to focus on a given task longer.

I am testing this method as I storm through my latest draft. It works. Not only that, but the method encourages me to work harder, because I know I need to get every thought out before that break, because I want to feel like I accomplished something going into my next, well, tomato.

There are many software apps designed around time management, but you can use something as simple as a tomato or egg timer. I use an app called 30/30 when possible. Otherwise I use a clock and keep time in my head. The point is to be aware of the end time, but not check the clock constantly while working. You also need to clear out any other distractions for the 25 minutes, because this is what is going to help you make the most of that time.

I want to see if I can apply this to class structure this semester. 75 minutes is a long time and the 8 week class meets for twice that amount daily. In these classes a pomodoro structure could allow us to really hone in on content and try to discern meaning out of what we are doing, because we spend valuable time accessing our critical thinking mechanisms  as opposed to fading as the end nears.

I’m looking forward to what comes next.

As fans we are taught to love a good story. We are supposed to cheer for the underdog, because their victory is somehow better than that of the constant winner. We were supposed to cheer for Notre Dame, but so many of us swallowed the Alabama pill and grinned all the way to that school’s 3rd national title in 4 years. This feels symbolic and indicative of where we are as an American collective. Put aside the weird sexual overtones of the musberger broadcast and you are left with a game that’s was about constant power beating the old guard. This feels like the last election where the old guard was defeated soundly across the board.

We are not into the myth of the returning dynasty. We are intrigued by the rise of the new and hope to be a part of it in some historical way.

The backburner is a dark dark place filled with unhappiness and unfinished tasks. The problem is, what is not done immediately often ends up there as mysterious and whispered about as lost socks. I see it from myself way too often. I start to work on a project only to see it wind up an unfinished thing sitting in a closet somewhere. Sadly, this is also true of how I deal with paperwork.

I think this is an easily solvable problem. Merely devote a patch of time to killing off these loose ends and paper trails that sprout up every work day. We know they are going to come up, so from X to XX it is time to deal with them properly. Amongst my smattering of ‘get me right’ solutions is to handle such issues on the front end. I intend to make the time for that work during the day, so I know that from X to XX what I am working on is the crucial paper bits that allow me to be successful and moreover appear as reliable and efficient as I would wish the world to see me as, instead of the dude who can never file his contracts on time.

Yes, even writers need to file their paperwork on time. However it isn’t just that. Getting it right in that regard–making sure you have all of your stuff together up front gives you the confidence to A) not worry about the small stuff  B) Feel like you can contribute real leadership. I think that all I’ve ever wanted to be in education is a leader. A leader of students and of faculty. You don’t have to lead from position, but you do need to lead from example.