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Reflecting on my ‘closer to zen’ state I thought a lot about the major stressors in my life. Planning represents the lion’s share of stress. If all of my lesson plans for the semester were ready to go, I could teach each and every day and love it. I enjoy the planning, but I don’t enjoy not having the lead time to do the planning. This has become less of an issue in recent weeks as I pull my life back into order after the standard start of the semester craziness.

In the end it turns out that order, preparedness, and a steady job is a key to happiness and even a key to being a good writer. I like to think I’m heading towards big things now that order has reasserted itself.

Only time will tell.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I don’t think NBC has much more of a shelf life when it comes to drama series. They’ve been running shows into the ground and releasing crap, so I find little to make me believe they can sustain more than a handful of shows in the prime time slots. They’re losing market share to the other big two and the incredible ingenuity of AMC and other cable entities.

Over the last few days I’ve found myself in an impressive state of calm and happiness. Nothing changed at home or at work or in my writing. In truth, I don’t have a clue as to how I got here, but I really enjoy this state of mind. Certainly it has something to do with not taking myself terribly seriously.

There are mixed opinions on whether one should take themselves serious. On the one hand, you don’t want to wander through the world being an idiot and not handling your responsibilities. At the same time, never lose sight of the fact that you poop and pee just like a monkey. We get wound up in our self-importance and our stunning exceptionalism. Where we go wrong the most is the idea that we can no longer be ourselves because of how ‘you being you’ might negatively impact someone and become part of the social record.

Zen for me is living by the serenity prayer, even if you aren’t a christian or better, even if you aren’t religious person at all. Zen is finding the strength to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Some Thoughts:

1. De Blasio for the win!

Week 1 is in the books and my fantasy team has its first win. I survived Manning’s historic night by starting 3 Eagles players at the ‘skill’ positions. Each earned me 16+ points. I ended up with a 9 point win in what will soon prove to be the start of a solid season; more solid than my picks this week. I went 11-5, landing me in a tie for 4th with Jaworski, Shlereth, and Shecter in the ESPN arena. The fan-created pick-em went 12-4, placing the world tied for 2nd above me. It ends here.

NE over NYJ
I’m going to bet against the Jets all year in hopes of being wrong every time. This time I don’t think they have the run game or depth to deal with a very fast and pass happy Brady bunch who, even without a recognizable TE, will dictate the pace of the game.

STL over Atlanta
Atlanta starts out 0-2 and STL looks like AZ did early last year. Fact: STL was really strong in their own division last year and they look to have taken the leap since then.

BUF over Carolina
Again the absence of a run game is a problem for the loosing team. CAR is a team that can put up a lot of points but do so slowly and must do so in a way that controls the pace of the game and dictates to the offense. You cannot take what BUF gives you. What they give you are sacks.

MIN over CHI
Peterson is the man. After watching Shady run wild on Monday, Peterson is certainly looking to add to his total. He will. CHI will feel his wrath.

WSH over GB
GB doesn’t have the backfield weapons Philly deployed. You’ll see an angry defense that gets to the QB and causes turnovers.

IND over MIA

KC over DAL
6 turnovers and its still a game in the final minute? Sorry, DAL, you are the weakest link in the NFC East. Goodbye, winning record.

PHI over SD
I want to start Rivers here, because they’ll be playing catch up and Kelly will not be letting up off the gas. I just don’t know if I am willing to bench Vick or Stafford.

BAL over CLE

HOU over TEN

AZ over DET
There will be a lot of hitting in this game and it will cost DET the win.

TB over NO
The run game will come to life in week two, allowing them to play more ball control offense and giving the QB a chance to work play-action where he is most effective.

OAK over JAC
No starting QB? No hope.

NYG over DEN
This Manning bowl goes to the NY Manning, because to score that many TDs two weeks in a row seems unrealistic. Also, to fumble and turn the ball over that many times two weeks in a row seems unrealistic. Fewer turnovers means a Giant win.

SF over SEA
Boldin gets the #1 receiver treatment this week and Colin K realizes that he needs to target his TE a lot more. The end result? CK with the win and RW without an eyebrow.

CIN over PIT
Chalk this up to your center going on IR, a top LB gone, and a backfield in flux. Big Ben is almost checked out of the offense to the point where I see this team trading him for Rivers in the offseason. Stranger things have happened…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I feel like my comments on the OSU scandal downplayed the importance of exposing the crime. The article leans in the direction my comments did. Several times they justify the paying of players by showing how much the players need the money and how the money was used. This is true. As an athlete I wasn’t allowed to have a job during the season. It got tight. I had an academic scholarship, which covered a lot, but I needed cash for a social life (or the illusion thereof). Did I cheat and work? Hell yes. I had to. Did that duality eventually break my dream of college ball? Yep. Can’t be everything to everyone, so having a steady payment plan allows you to be the one thing you need to be in order to be successful in athletics: a hard studying gym rat.

I often find myself wondering why some shows are successful in spite of spotty numbers and others fall flat. I think one way is a willingness to sell out. One of the main summer shows I watch is Rizzoli & Isles, a crime drama based on the Tess Gerritsen books. The show is a very fun buddy flick that spends as much time on fashion and friendship as it does on murder. It also spends a great deal of time promoting products. I’m not talking about commercials.

I’m talking about product placement.

Google Rizzoli and Isles and among the links list directing you to TNT, you’ll find a link to Scholls. They are a sponsor of the show and you’ll see their products (along with many others) floating through many of the shows most poignant scenes. This isn’t a new practice, but devoting dialogue and sometimes even complete scenes to a product is pretty new. It is a way to make money that is without a doubt selling out, but is it wrong?

Some Thoughts:

1. Tonight’s post is a palindromic number–not the first i’ve ever had, btw, but it is only the 3rd since I broke 1000. Silly nerd stuff.
2. I am coming around to understand a woman’s sometime insatiable need for handbags.
3. The Oklahoma State scandal is nothing we haven’t heard, fictionalized, and rationalized before. The sex makes it salacious, but the money is what is most familiar and common about the tale. We know players get paid at the college level. We know grades are fixed, we even know that sex is handed out like helmet stickers. We just don’t want to change our sport bad enough to make it stop. Case and point: Ohio State was in the penalty last year for numerous ‘supposed’ violations.  This year, they are being cheered as potential national champions. Nobody cares about the rules. They care about the wins.

I remain grateful for the opportunity to teach and to interact with students. The energy and excitement and raw potential they bring is pretty inviting to an old vampire like me. This is my 1 on 1 week where I get to sit down with all of the students in two separate courses and learn a bit about them and their needs. I think the greatest thing a person can do in life is to inspire others, so I work very hard to be the guy that gets others going.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m not one for keeping up with the Joneses, but when I see something I really like in a home, I want that. I spent some time at the neighbor’s house and found myself saying ‘I want that’ a lot. Maybe part of going back to work is having a desire to improve your position or environment.
2. Time for a haircut.
3. The Eagles are the real deal. They basically run the kind of offense you run for little kids with the awareness that kids never get tired.

The signs of burnout can be physical as well as mental. I don’t know that I showed too many signs, but the burnout was both obvious and overwhelming to me. Even in the throws of my best writing opportunities in years, I was torn between feeling utterly spent and trying to give my all to the stories. The moment the writing ended my creativity lapsed into a coma. Now, as I write this post, I can feel the edges of the coma thawing like fingers slowly finding movement and coming back to life.

I needed a rest. I needed a sense of understanding of how I got here and how to prevent myself from getting here again. My physical analysis shows that I sleep roughly 65% of the 8 hrs I need to sleep in order to effectively refresh my body. I don’t move as much either, usually completing less than 8,000 steps per day on days I don’t coach. I move more when I coach, which is relative to the sport I am coaching and my coaching role (head coach, asst., trainer). There is a clear connection between physical activity and brain function, and that correlation grows stronger when applied to direct learning exercises and neuroplasticity.

Now I’m in a space where I can see a solution. Move, think, and be yourself. That means I have to allow myself to enjoy who I am (faults and all) in order to remove the stress of trying to be someone I’m not. That, and overworking, led to burnout and sucked my creativity dry.

Here’s to getting it back.

One of the main reasons I love writing Shadowrun is the opportunity to draw pleasure out of everyday corporate life. Growing up in the steel and glass canyons of NYC I was exposed to a lot of the corporate life. Right designer, right school, right car, daily protocols. I suppose I’m channeling my inner Joseph Finder when I sit down and think about these things. I wonder how distribution networks really come together and stay together. I wonder about the middle men and how people manage to make a profit on the margins. That is the stuff I love writing about, because there is so much mystery there. Nobody knows what really goes on, which gives me plenty of space to make it up and to make it far more interesting than it probably could be otherwise.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watching Zero Dark Thirty, written by fellow Bronx Science alum and Writing Club member Mark Boal, I found myself thinking really hard about torture and what defines torture and what would be ‘enough’ for me to want to condone that. I think it is easier to have done than to be intimately involved in the process. That physical separation makes the psychological separation much simpler.
2. Rough soccer day. I’m realizing my 8-9 team is going to be terrible without all of the lynchpin guys. We have 2 on defense, a rover, and 2 strikers that the team cannot function without. 1 defender messed up his foot and was ineffective after, one striker messed up his ankle and was on the bench, and the rover had a stomach flu. the 2 minutes that rover was in there you saw the energy level of the whole team pick up in response. He is the key. They need his energy to get them moving.

A Teacher, the new Hannah Fidell film opening digitally and on the big screen today, explores the erotic and psychologically demanding relationship between a High School teacher and the student she is sleeping with. I cannot help but think this film would have been dead in production had the genders of the teacher and student been reversed. Not since Lolita has this sort of dark territory been properly addressed, and even then the gender descriptions played a huge role in the interpretation of the relationship. I wonder if films like this aren’t working to maintain the dominant stereotype of woman as nymphet and man as hapless victim?

Lolita is now internationally known as a term for a hyper-sexual young woman. How it got there has more to do with the film than the book. In Kubrick’s well-recieved adaptation, the  14 year old girl is generally seen as a sex object and portrayed at times as wanting to maintain that image. Therefore the struggle becomes for the man to somehow resist what are more modernly portrayed as his acceptable urges to be with this woman. This old refrain is common today. I recently shared an Axe commercial with one of my classes. In the commercial the ‘announcer’ takes on the role of a lecturer as he explains that women are getting ‘hotter’ and that threatens all men. We tend to internalize such things, sparking debates such as ‘what does she think is going to happen when she dresses like that?’ As if my gender is so weak that we’ll take a woman’s attire as an implicit request for sexual advances. In fact, many men do just that, and this is what troubles me about the new film A Teacher. 

I haven’t seen the film, so I will only speak to the way it is being advertised. Everything about this film suggests a certain neediness and desire to ‘take’ the high school boy. At the same time, the only suggestion of wrong doing comes from snippets of her worry of getting caught. Moreover, she seems more concerned about the boy’s interest in other women and the boy acting like a boy by posting pictures of her than she does about the fact that what she is doing undermines long standing social mores.

Or does it?

Maybe what I’m bothered by is the implicit perception here that it is more okay for a female teacher to engage a high school student than it is for a male student to do the same. When we see this in the media, the idea of who is taking advantage of who shifts, because of the strange duality of who we call victim and when we call them victims. Or maybe I’m bothered that this portrayal won’t advance the conversation at all but instead will confuse the matter and make us second guess who is to blame the next time this sort of thing happens in our schools.

The best stuff I read is the stuff that comes out of left field–be it from perspective, relationships, context, or what have you. Looper, for example, caught me unawares because of the concept of having to murder your future self as the final act of your employment. I liked that in the way I like the guessing game that is Gone Girl, where you see two sides of a relationship gone horribly wrong or Room, which introduced me to a perspective I found unique and inviting. What all of these stories have in common is that they made the familiar unfamiliar in a way that made it interesting to engage with the story.

Lets be honest, every story has already been told. Your job as a writer is to find the human interest story within that an tell it from a different angle. Create a scenario–any scenario–and use that scenario to look at character interaction from an angle you haven’t seen before. That is how you stay creative.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Shout out to Kevin Hearne for agreeing to sit with my creative writing students for a period. The voice of experience and success is often heard more clearly.

I’m a bit rusty at this, so be gentle. Well, the truth is the Wednesday posts are the least read posts of the week/year/ever, so the only critic I need to worry about when it comes to football pics is myself. It is a shame nobody listens, though. See, I’m pretty damn good at this. Once I recognized that my athletic days were long behind me (though I still feel the need to make excuses for not showing up to the Sunday morning pickup game), I made an effort to learn all I could about the game and be good in terms of analysis. Last year that meant I beat all but 3 of the ESPN pros. This year I actually know what I’m doing.

So, its on. Here it goes:

Denver over Baltimore
Ray Rice is going to run wild and give me a heap of fantasy points. Unfortunately, the lack of a serious Raven secondary and presence of a hungry team of wideouts means Manning will be able to bounce back quick. Look for the second half to turn ugly.

New England over Buffalo
There is a lot of talk about the changes on the Baltimore defense. Remember, the guy they went with has a history of doing good things against Patriots offenses. Unfortunately, the Patriots have more talent and have a scheme they know better than the scheme Buffalo does not know. It will be closer than we could imagine on the surface, but Brady is still going to be Brady.

Seattle over Carolina
Upset alert! I want to believe that Carolina can show the fans something at home in this nascent 2013-14 season. I just don’t believe they have accumulated enough talent to do so against a defense that could very well be a top 5 this year. Get your Skittles ready.

Cincinnati over Chicago
Call this one the HBO bump. I wasn’t terribly interested in the Hard Knocks show this season, but I am aware of how much better the Bengals play when under the spotlight. Oh, and James Harrison is over there now. There’s that.

Miami over Cleveland
2013’s answer to the Sacko Bowl comes early this year. CLE was excellent in the preseason, and Miami was not. Still, the preseason is about developing a depth chart and where depth matters (at the top of the chart) CLE is still rather thin. Their running game should keep it close, but not close enough.

Oakland over Indy
Spoiler alert: Pryor is legit as a scrambling QB. He won’t shock the world this year or even perform at a Vick level, but he will do enough in the early going to give Raider fans hope. Hope that will be snatched away in week 2.

KC over JAC

NO over ATL

TB over NYJ
All three of those games aren’t even in contention. People will readily assume ATL is a good matchup, but it is week 1 and they are not 100%. KC is still healthy (wait for it), and my beloved Jets stink worse than a skunk in decomp.

Pit over TEN

SF over GB
Nnamdi has a lot to prove here, and he will get his chance against this 3 wide set where he will likely draw the job of covering Nelson or Cobb in the slot. As he goes so does the game, because CK isn’t turning into Superman in week 1.

Arizona over St Louis
Toughest pick of the night. STL did very well against division rivals last season–at least in comparison to the rest of their record. I believe in AZ early. I have no reason to believe in AZ past week 5.

NYG over DAL
No-brainer. Eli signed his name on the wall in the guest locker room on opening night. Giants have owned the stadium ever since.

PHI over WAS
Incredibly interesting battle of old philosophy vs. new and the eventual passing of the torch from dad the coach to son the coach. There is going to be a ton of offense here.

Hou over SD
Who Cares? Bowl 2013. Seriously. Does anyone believe either of these teams are contenders past the 1st round of the playoffs? HOU has the best defensive player in the sport, but their offense sputters and coughs like a 89 yr old smoker on a ventilator. Their #1 receiver is roughly that old in football years. Their #1 RB will dress, might play, might not. Ben Tate is more than a serviceable backup, and if I were coaching I would play Tate and rest Foster for a few more weeks. I would also have found a legit #2 wideout through trades or maybe the draft, but that is just me.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Finally started Gone Girl. I’m impressed with the female reader as much as I am with the flow of the writing for that character. It is the creepy male protag that has me unsure. The casting of Affleck as the lead in the movie version only confirms the creep factor.