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Several of my sociology students did their year-end presentation on the concept of role conflict and how it applies to their lives. The term is defined as “emotional conflict arising when competing demands are made on an individual in the fulfillment of his or her multiple social roles.” Watching them talk and the resulting discussions made me rethink my own role conflicts. I’m a writer, a boyfriend, a father, a teacher, and a coach. These things occupy the majority of my time and headspace, often overlapping and creating immense conflict. 

For example, I always have conflicts between work and parenting, because I want to come home and spend time with loved ones but I still have work to do. I still have writing that needs to get handled. Then I need to leave home not even two hours after the key hits the door in order to go be a coach. I’m not even going to get into how this has made my boyfriend role suffer (only got 10 min, folks).

For me the conflict centers around time and mental energy. Each role places significant demands on me and I am having to decide on a daily basis which role is going to be the so-called primary role for that day and receive the most attention. I’m certain this is what everyone goes through and I am just applying fancy terms to the age-old process of juggling responsibilities. Still, the terms help me to rationalize and quantify exactly how much is expected of me on a daily basis.

It is a lot.

Sometimes things get neglected and I sacrifice being effective at one role to really just maintain others. Luckily, I’m a professor, which means that I can enjoy two months of reduced labor in one role, giving me the time and energy to focus on others.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m still here. Didn’t quit the writing life. Never could if I tried.
2. There are things I do in life that are utterly frivolous and meaningless and quite probably a waste of my time. Facebook is, of course, one of those things. It is largely useless and inane, I still use it, and thats okay. My bestie recently asked my why I still look at posts and I really didn’t have a good answer. I decided this morning that I don’t need a ‘good answer’. Everyone has something that they do that is really useless and offers no gain from an outsiders perspective. This is relative as their ‘gain’ and your ‘gain’ might be very different. In other words, taking a moment to scroll through a handful of silly posts on facebook makes me happy for some reason and, since it doesn’t hurt anyone, I shouldn’t have to justify it. Like I said, we all have something like that. Some people have the Kardashians. I’ll try to be better about judging that too.
3.  Still having issues uploading from wordpress…

I must admit there are days where being a writer is the furthest thing from my mind and remembering to put words together is nearly impossible to do. When that happens writing can seem like an inconvenience. Who wants to to drop everything and spend ten minutes posting to a daily blog. It seems silly–meaningless even. I feel like that more than I want to admit. I don’t always want to string together words and continue this habit. And then when I do I think about the counter–2275 could easily be the last one and then I can finally exhale, skip one, and start over at one.

What would it matter?

I don’t think it would matter to anyone but me, and for me it would be a small yet powerful admittance of failure. It would reflect the moment I gave up and let the ideas of writing slide down the scale of importance to a place where it honestly could never come back from. Writing is something I love and take great pride in, but it is also the most difficult and often fruitless pursuit in my life. Like I wrote above, it wouldn’t matter to anyone to me that I quit and I could do so without anyone being the wiser.

But then I would know. I would remember every day that I laid down and gave up and then I wouldn’t have any credibility with myself. I wouldn’t feel like I had to keep going with anything I ever did when it came to writing. Clearly this wasn’t why I started the blog, but over time this is what it became. An outlet, a promise, and a daily rededication to the cause I hold most dear.

The best way to write is to read and read a lot of the material written in the vein you wish to write. To that end I have been relentlessly hammering shut the holes in my sci-fi reading history. I’m currently reading Ernest Cline’s Ready, Player One which strikes me as a YA effort to recreate some of the fantastic writing generated by the cyberpunk movement and marry that to ideas about the decay of the world brought about by social media. I think Cline delivers his argument well, though he does drift off into introspection and description ad naseum. This is something I’ve found less troubling over the years. Don’t get me wrong, if one of my writers starts to wax philosophical straight into an infodump we are going to have words, but here I find it somewhat more acceptable. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of the 80’s that encourages me to just kick back and enjoy it.

That being said, I must admit that there are a lot of untapped ideas out there when it comes to sci fi. I’m a common culprit of the ‘every story has been written’ saying, but that is only partially true. The specific combination of ideas, characters, and dramatic situations leads to uncommon and often completely original stories all the time. Sure, it has elements of X,Y, Z, but that isn’t a problem—heck, that is the very definition of trope. The trick—the good writing, in fact—is to turn trope into terribly good writing and to keep your audience engaged throughout.

I fear grad school made me worry about producing the next great American novel when all I really ought to be doing is telling good stories. The rest will come, or it won’t.

Some Thoughts:

1. Obviously the blog is back up, but I am still pissed that it went down and my host provider has yet to do more than just apologize. Get it right, people. That was several days without publishing. Had this been a paid writing situation I’d be broke. And Jobless. And thus homeless. Which sucks even worse in the AZ summer…
2. I’m glad I have a job and a home and the bestie.
3. … and the kids. Talis love the kids.

I deeply considered dropping the ball on the blog tonight. It would have been so easy without the server. As it is, these late night posts are bunk. I’m drained and incapable of doing what I need to this day, but I am still here and hammering out the work that needs to get done.

 

My heart is set on developing a plan for the future—a plan to develop myself as a novelist and put out some more short stories outside of the Shadowrun realm. This of course, all adds up to me putting more focus into being a writer. This means finding a way to be more structured and responsible in all of those other areas of my life and consolidating some of the things I do. It also means cutting back to a certain extent.

 

Most of all it means taking advantage of my surroundings in terms of the people around me, home life, and the opportunities I’ve been presented as a writer to develop my name (which is a writer’s brand) and hone my skills to be better than I’ve been before and develop a production schedule that allows me to not only be good but to be regularly productive and proactive with due dates.

 

These are just words so far, and I’ve written a lot of them over the years. Time to move beyond the words and into action.

The talislegger blog died tonight on the heels of the NFL draft and the Maricopa Community College Adjunct Faculty Association Outstanding Faculty of the year awards. I mention those two occasions because they were the only things that mattered to me at the time. My bestie was awarded an Adjunct Faculty of the year award, and the Giants drafted some fool CB they didn’t need the same way the Cowboys drafted a third starting RB for their ‘empty’ backfield.

Once I realized what was going on, I decided that going to a save file and completing today’s blog was the best course of action. Still, I didn’t have anything to say. I don’t have anything to say. Perhaps the most damaging thing about writing at night is that by the time I sit down to do this at night I’m fresh out of ideas—another reason to reopen the archive.

So, I leave you with some thoughts and some more awareness of my limitations…

Some Thoughts:
1. No, they did not kill off Elizabeth Keane. She’s in hiding to escape Reddington. I say this without watching the latest ‘funeral’ episode, but there are things that just make sense as a writer and there are things that don’t. Her coming back makes sense.
2. Cheat day: went over around 500 calories on the diet. Still, it was entirely worth it. I had my first legit burger and fries since this ride started.

I’ve been pretty happy lately, and I think a lot of that has to do with how I’ve been allowing myself to feel and think lately. It can be very easy to slip into despair based on the problems in your life and work and the habits you’ve developed. I let myself go there from time to time, falling upon this foolish feeling of woe and, on top of all that, anger at simple people. Scroll back about a thousand posts and you’ll see me write, “never let an asshole rent space in your head.” Well, I offered a condo with an eyeball view. It all comes back to having good people around you that remind you that you are capable of great things as opposed to people who drown you in drama, negativity, and the proclivity to remind you of how incredible they are, even when they aren’t.

So, bad people and energy gone, what is it I’m focused on these days? I’m excited to see my mid kid enter the football playoffs for the second straight season. He’s with a new team, same league, same results. I have seen so much more personal improvement and joy from him this year. I’m not quite certain if he is there as a leader yet, but he is clearly trying to be that as well, and I like it. Two more weeks of football and its on to summer break for me. I like that even more.

This summer is about reading and exploring new authors and making connections that I can use to vastly improve the quality of my classroom both F2F and online. Its funny, I was hoping for this to be the best semester in some time and it turned out to be the worst–perhaps ever. Nothing but drama, lack of engagement, and poor time management. I know I’m better than that, but this semester clearly hasn’t demonstrated it.

Some Thoughts:

1. Still on that late night posting kick. I guess I ought to say it to myself: Come on, man!

Before I put wine to lips (and cheesecake to gut) I need to get a few things off my chest.

Hillary Clinton is on the verge of being the first female president. If we let her. I think we should. I think We should make Bernie her VP in order to keep that progressive democratic agenda at the surface of the administration. We need that influx of ideas to prevent Clinton’s flat, old school political, business as usual agenda. She is someone who wont really move us forward without a bernie bouy, but she is absolutely not someone who will push us back into the stone age or create a sitation where we are bombed back there.

Nobody wants that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Kids aren’t quite ready to get rid of the cat. Or take care of it. She’s sure good with critters though. Ultimately, it comes down to creating an environment for the family and I’m going to do that, even if it means Skittles has to find a new home. Allergies are a big deal.

Once upon a time I was a writer. I poured ideas into the internet like coffee from a carafe. I was all about the idea. I wanted to fill notebooks with the thoughts I had and the stories I could write and then I wanted to fill webpages with the stories people should hear and see and the games they could develop off these ideas. It started to die off with the dumpshock forums and got worse the more I wrote for the Shadowrun game I loved so much. At first I thought the well of ideas was drying up because I was running out of ideas. Some of that is true. Some of it is fatigue. Most of it is laziness and the changes largely triggered by the changes in my body composition. I write best when I feel best and have the wealth of energy to do so. I also write best when I allow myself to be in a position to care about writing and being healthy and accepting love first and foremost in my life.

Where I went wrong was thinking that I didn’t have the energy to do any of that. Deep down I think I knew the idea archive was my green ring, and I think that a lot of my writing impotence as of late has to do with this failure to constantly generate new ideas; it represents a failure to take advantage of the world happening around me and cultivate that into idea. In many ways it also represents me getting involved in the petty politics and elementary school level emotional drama of the workplace. This last bit of self awareness is a dramatic shift away from the guy who wanted to be everybody’s friend and spent the majority of his time doing so. I’m a writer and teacher, so that is where my hours need to go.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m starting to like this cat. Pity she has to go. The allergies are far too much of an issue to have her remain a part of the family. The boys have to come first.

I’ve noticed the tendency of internet news sources to make a very big deal out of nothing. I think it has to do with the fact that there isn’t enough saleable news to go around in a 24 hour cycle filled with watered down internet outlets and automated news bots writing crap articles. This isn’t to say that there should be no more internet news, but to say that the idea of news itself has, well, shifted in a way that consistently makes us less intelligent as a culture and perhaps even a species. The problem therein is that we aren’t changing the system. In truth we are making it worse by insuring that news remains based on what sells and not based upon some (albeit arbitrary) point of view on what needs to matter to a national populace.

I often sound like a communist when I say such things. I get that government control is the devil–especially in our culture. Americans love the idea of freedom, but few are aware that this perceived freedom exists within the confines of acceptable behaviors and those behaviors that are, without fail, set by corporate entities who have the bottom line to worry about and not the cultural point of view.

Some Thoughts:

1. I refuse to do tomorrow’s post while this tired. I likewise fail to understand why the early onset fatigue. It seems to be growing as I step back from the late night coffee crowd.

 

 

Starting to pull it together a bit more during these evenings where I’m up to some ungodly hour. I’m also getting the hand of prioritizing. That’s something I can use. I can also use a few minutes to jot down…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The wise man is the one who rides the free HBO service for a month and the proceedes to pay absolute rock bottom for said service through negotiation with and manipulation of the Directv personnel, playing on their intrinsic (read: scripted and internalized) understanding of your value as a long time customer. I will have my Game of Thrones.
2. After nearly a week, this proof of concept 2000 calorie diet is completely doable. I believe I’ll be down five pounds by tuesday and I don’t feel all that hungry ever. Next, I have to start looking at what kind of calories I’m putting in my body. Ending the night on a slice of cheesecake wasn’t epic. Still, I am proud of myself for saving enough calories in order to make that moment a reality.
3. Speaking of proud, I’m super proud of my boys. Their athlete side is starting to show. The mid in particular deserves a shout. The kid played a morning rec league soccer game in an older age bracket (10-12 and he turned 9 this month) and managed two goals. Later that day he went on to rip of a great TD run and 1 pt conversion. This is on top of playing excellent defense.
4. At some point I’m going to have to stop announcing he’s so young for his age bracket. I mean, either you play with them or not. They don’t care how old you are…