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The more things change the more they remain the same. But why? Lately I’ve been thinking about the idea of change and wondering why people are so terribly resistant to change–especially change that is good for them. Change often leads to discomfort. I’m a person used to my daily rituals and routines. Anything that upsets the delicate balance I call my life is going to make me upset, at least until I can find new balance, but what about the really big changes? Those seem to be untenable to most people.

The example I like to use the most is the story of the two little girls raised in a family of white supremacists. They were raised to sing pride songs and hate anyone not like themselves. What if one day they decided to like people who were different? The cost of that would be drastic. They’d lose everything. So it becomes a simpler choice to stay haters and live the lifestyle. Change is tough, so we don’t do it.

When change hits us in the mouth we fight back, no matter the change. Its on public display every election. I see it in the smallest changes and in the largest. Unless we invite change into our homes (and sometimes even then) we’ll push back and act as though the change isn’t good for us.

Some Thoughts:

1. I wanted to say more on this topic, but I’m bummed about the Giants. Perhaps thats the change I’m resisting. I am used to having faith that my team will ultimately be successful, but I need to realize that the Giants aren’t going to be good until they get through this nascent rebuilding phase and that rebuilding needs to begin with several linemen in this draft.

Thursday’s football match up served as a reminder that anything can happen during a game. The Broncos came out extremely flat, leading to an inability to create very much energy on the offensive side of the ball leading to a mediocre 20 points. 27 points from the upstart Chargers was enough for the win. So, is that how its going to be for Sunday and Monday? Sort of….

ATL over WAS
I think the hype over the RGIII benching really dilutes the fact that the ‘Skins are pretty awful to begin with. I’m talking NY Giants bad.

NYG over Seattle
Even a bad team has a chance to look good from time to time. I think this weekend represents a major trap game for a Seattle team already looking ahead to the Super Bowl.

NYJ over Carolina
Jets are bad on offense, but the theme for this week is upset. What we’re going to see here is a mobile QB made immobile by a fast and dangerous D that has the potential to score some points on Sunday.

I’ve become increasingly aware of a phenomenon. People around me interact with the world indirectly. They are no longer watching the world, but are watching the world through tiny glass screens. Some corporations have already found new ways to capitalize on the phenomenon. Google Glass was born out of the idea that we experience life through our cellphones. We spend hours tethered to palm-sized chinese made cases of glass and circuitry that represent windows into highly personalized social spaces and windows out of the everyday world.

My awareness of this phenomenon clicked into focus this evening when I found myself asking a friend to text some pics from the xmas block party she was going to. I immediately recalled the xmas block party I went to on Black Friday and how important it was to me to capture the moment in picture. Instead of watching my boys climb on Santa’s lap, I photographed the event, insuring they would be able to see themselves years from now and further insuring that I missed the reality of the moment myself.

Taking pictures of something isn’t the same as experiencing it; in fact it dims the moment like plugging too many items in a socket. The moment is preserved in photo yet lost entirely. Perhaps if we put down the phones and camera’s we could stay in the moment itself a bit longer and create moments that will last in our hearts.

This article posted on CNN struck me as a bad joke. Once I realized Texas was involved I not only believed it but expected it. The story goes like this: A 16 yr old rich kid got drunk and drove erratically, leading to the death and or severe injury of a car full of people. The defense claimed the parents should share the blame because their money created a situation where the kid felt privileged enough to drink and drive. The lawyer went on to suggest throwing the kid in jail wouldn’t ‘essen the suffering for any of those families,’ victimized by the crime.

There may be a silver lining. The verdict puts responsibility on the parents, which exposes them to a massive lawsuit. If this defense can work, then we have a long way to go in order to become the society we want to be.

I have a terrible time saying goodbye. Letting go feels like dying; so much so that in the moment of departure I look back on everything that came before, remembering the good I did, the bad, and recognizing the disappointment of what can never be. In all my writings and readings I never came across a quote as truly telling as one from Marcus Aurelius who is thought to have said, “The act of dying is one of the acts of life.” Indeed it is one of two acts over which you cannot escape: birth and death. When we are closest to birth the world is possibility and light. When we are closest to death the world may be shaded with the memory of missed opportunities.

I believe I spent too much of my life dwelling on the things I could’ve done, the life I could’ve had, and choices not made or even made in error. These are wasted moments best forgotten as opposed to dwelling on. The hours spent thinking about ‘why not?’ are never as productive or meaningful as getting out there and doing or even pausing to reflect on ‘what next?’

We don’t have forever. We aren’t even promised to end today, so isn’t every moment an opportunity to advance our dreams? If we aren’t living the life we intended, we should be living the life that is intended for us. We should be trying to be the best person we are capable of–our dream person, and we should never ever surrender–never ever settle–until we get there.

Final Thoughts:

1. My heart hurt even writing that blog. I am a strong believer of universal karma and the idea that what you put into the world is given back to you. I wrote that blog as if I were dying. I am not dying. Not yet. I am not ending the blog until condition of my death. However, I am inspired by the work of Randy Pausch to model the last lecture as realistically as I can. It seems like people at the edge of life are heard more clearly. There is something compelling about the finality of a person’s existence that makes the last words they write hold value. I want to include this structure as a teaching tool, so I modeled it here today. Now I recognize how hard it is to say such things and not feel your own mortality; to feel your life beating out of existence.
2. Part of me wonders if we are all already dead and the mere acceptance of that fact allows us to recognize time not as a constant or an arrow but merely as a state of being that can be altered.

When I hit the web to check sports I always stop to check the links that line up on the side of the page. Today I wandered on to the Bleacher Report and was rewarded with an ad suggesting I might be in the market for an Armenian wife. I’m not. Frankly I have no idea why the system thought I was. Perhaps it was the page. I don’t check the WWE page ever, so maybe my curiosity was seen as indicative of a deeper desire. As though wanting to know what The Rock is up to triggers a hidden subroutine designed to ferret out those seeking a certain quality of advertisement. The Rock’s sudden if-then nature aside, the moment set me to thinking about the algorithm, and now I’m wondering what mine looks like.

My Algorithm first introduced itself through a series of peculiar google search results. I noticed how my results and those from friends were different. Once I knew it was there I saw my algorithm everywhere, a digital stalker silently watching my every webpage. It followed me to NPR, snuck into my audible account, and camped out on amazon deciding what I might purchase next.

I’m going to have to come to terms with my algorithm. I need to pet it, feed it, and let it grow. This thing is a part of me now; my digital shadow.

I’m stuck for ideas this Sunday. I feel like I’ve given a lot of my passion and energy to a semester that is all but in the books and I’m at the pause between where I can refocus my priorities and really dig deep into the work I want to be doing and the writing I want to be writing. Here’s a quick reflection: I’m teaching a lot of very cool classes and I want to keep doing that, but I intend to do it in manageable doses. I don’t need to do everything at once. I suppose it comes down to labeling priorities–something I’ve waxed about in the past. So now in the pause before the pause I’m going to empty out my brain on y’all.

Some Thoughts:

1. A close friend decided to read the blog and mentioned that it was a lot like looking into someone’s diary. It seems I am in fact an open book. Hey, friend, keep reading and eventually I’ll get around to talking about you…
2. It turns out the term muse can be offensive. I saw it in terms of creative influence, or stimulus, or inspiration. I don’t quite get how that is a problem, but if you dig a little deeper into the commercial and literary use of the term it is more likely to be equated with sexual surrogacy than anything intellectually, ahem, stimulating. So, yeah, my bad on that one.
3. I want a NYT Bestseller. I stopped caring about this for a while, but I’m done with that laid back phase. Being a writer, IMHO, requires a certain level of intensity that comes with being successful in any craft. If I decide to be the writer I can be, I’m going to be able to achieve the goals I can achieve.
4. Nightmares the last few nights. I can only remember snippets, but it is enough to know that I don’t want to remember any more. What’s odd is every time I have a nightmare so does my 6 yr old.

Once upon a time I lived for video games. I bought them and consumed them. I spent most of my time playing and trying to finish these games. Back in 2006 I stopped playing entirely for several months. The day I stopped was after a particularly exciting Madden Football game. I won the game and it meant the end of the season–the end of the franchise. In other words, I wasn’t going to be able to play with those characters again. I needed to start over or simply wait till the next game came out. I started to wonder why I was playing at all? I mean I enjoyed the game but it didn’t matter at all. I wasn’t even playing against other people. It may have bee the first time I reflected on my gaming habits in any serious way.

That reflection began with the question, “So what?” in other words, now that I’ve finished the game, so what? I didn’t have a good answer. I wasn’t gaining anything from the game but a major distraction. The next step was to make a list of pros and cons having to do with the game itself. I listed all the reasons I played and all the things I missed out on because of playing so many bloody games. The list helped me to strike a comfortable balance between games and the rest of my life. I don’t game nearly as much anymore, but I recognize the ‘so what’ there is ‘so it makes me happy’.

This model of reflecting on various aspects of your life and searching for meaning in your actions is useful. Most of the time we do things we are doing them out of habit. Well, not all habits are good and even fewer are good for us. You need to close the loop on your actions by reflecting and deciding if what and how you’re doing this is best for you. We all can learn a lot from self examination.

It might sound like a line from a poem a creeper would write before sneaking into your house to smell your sheets, but it is more rooted in the ideas of Jacques Derrida than Jeffery Dahmer. The more I drift through life the more convinced I become that the way I experience life is unique to me just as the way each individual experiences life is unique to them. In that sense we are not living in a shared reality but are merely sharing an understanding of the signposts of that reality. This is true on many different levels–from the way we see and feel physical items all the way to the more interpretive emotional states that exist within ourselves and between people.

Though we may chose to abide by a shared set of morals and principles, how we see those things and how we see the action of one another are completely individual perceptions. Once the doors close and we are tucked away from the world we are left to ponder the easy ideas of ‘what does it mean to me?’ For example: When I heard about the Sandy Hook shooting, my reaction was to wonder about the kids and their families. For others it was a call to anger, a fight about gun control. To others it was a conspiracy that needed to be outed.

We view people differently. We measure life differently, and wealth differently. We can look at the same night sky and come up with a billion different interpretations. We can read the same book and love it or hate it depending on who we are and where we come from. I believe the world is a singular organism and each of us are its eyes through which it sees 6 billion different worlds, and six billion different night skies, and 6 billion divergent lives. Each of us is living just one.