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Still at a bit of a loss for words. I need to find them soon, less the meager writing talent dry up and blow away. I’m on the verge of starting movie reviews under the perspective screen name of B-Reel. It has a hop hop feel to it and is clever to boot–or corny. I’ll keep thinking about that one. Anything to keep me from thinking about this grief stuff. When I lost my father it took me a good year to actually accept the fact that he hadn’t simply gotten on a bus and rode away. I kept looking for him on busses but never found him. I’m certain now that he is gone, but that understanding was a long time in the making.

I’ll probably end up doing what I do best–throw money at the problem. The office isn’t finished and the kids room needs curtains. I can handle that; keep my arms moving with the labors of love as I prepare to step slowly into that pool of work waiting for me. I’m sure there is even a high degree of organizing I could be doing. There is all sorts of stuff I can fall back on to get my head and emotions back to centre.

I just need to figure out how to move towards one of them.

My wife had two fathers. The first was by blood and marriage and he lived a good long life. The marriage failed and years later his Parkinson’s Disease took his life. We mourned his death not much more than a year ago, 2.4.12. Today her second father died suddenly leaving all of us shocked and unable to understand how fragile life can really be.

Au (a way of saying uncle in Lao) suffered what appears to be a brain hemorrhage and died this afternoon. He was healthy. He was planning to drive to Colorado to surprise my wife on her vacation. I cannot say what caused the aneurism, but I can say that it shocks me to the core. I felt invincible as a teen; less so now, but I never before imagined that there could be that tiny killer inside of me that could rip me from this life so suddenly. Eventually I will be able to process what happened and effectively deal with the loss. I can say this about the man: I lost my stepfather at 12 and until I met Au I never had a male role model who believed in me, respected me, and loved me.

We tend to define ourselves by our accomplishments. That could mean what we do, how much money we have, or who loves us. I feel like the definition of who we are has nothing to do with those things. I think the definition of an individual is about who we inspire. Au’s love inspired me to be everything I could be for the family. I will miss his voice, his smile, his jokes, and most of all, his love.

The Aaron Hernandez case highlighted some of the difficulties that NFL teams face in investing in people who are entirely unscrupulous if talented players. The Hernandez gamble backfired leaving at least one dead and a team trading back jerseys so fans can erase the memory of 81 and start fresh. That is the Patriot Way. Who are we kidding here? Since the Belichick, winning is the Patriot Way, but the loss of both TE’s puts that in jeopardy.

I’m an ardent Jet fan and looking at the rest of the division I have to believe the team has a legitimate divisional crown shot now. The Patriots will be a tough 9-7 if Brady can sustain a passing game with no receivers. The Jets will run first and put up decent numbers so long as Sanchez is out of the way. The Bills will still stink, leaving the Dolphins as the team to look to as the wildcard. I don’t know who the Dolphins are or who they will be behind second year QB Ryan Tannehill.

So, can the Jets make the playoffs? Yes, because they have to. They have to in spite of Sanchez. They have to, because if they don’t Coach Ryan is gone, and I’m not ready for that yet.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The Paula Deen fallout continues. She seems to me to be a target–a touchstone or even a talisman for our current feelings about racism. We want to believe we are past it so we shun anyone (anyone who isn’t too powerful) who has even the slightest perception of being racist. 
2. Haven’t seen a big screen release of a stand up comic since Eddie Murphy. Is Kevin Hart the new Murphy?

I’ve been coaching youth sports for a few years now and everything I read and hear from other coaches and professionals points to the idea that the kids are supposed to be playing for fun. Winning is not the objective at all. This is reinforced in the leagues I participate in by not even keeping score in most cases. In basketball the scoreboard isn’t even turned on until the 8-9 level. It is shut off once the score reaches a 20 point disparity. The kids aren’t supposed to care about winning, or awards, or accolades, but they do. It feels schizophrenic to tell kids from the time they are born that winning doesn’t matter and then sit them down in front of a TV or in a stadium where it is immediately apparent that winning is all that matters. I don’t think the problem is introducing kids to professional athletics. I think the problem is not being upfront about the value of winning and losing.

People like Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, and Stephen King are only successful thanks to the fortitude they built through failure. Jordan even made a commercial about it. When we remove the specter of loss we remove the opportunity for victory and take away the very sense of competitive closure that is necessary for kids to grow to appreciate competition. If you give everyone an identical medal you might as well give no metal at all, because it limits the meaning to ‘I participated in a sport!’

They have uniforms and photos for that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Not spending a lot of time being an intellectual means not having very much to write about.
2. Cold Justice creator Dick Wolf found the two most attractive competent female criminal specialists he could and slid them into pantsuits in order to create his new show, Cold Justice. The real question is: How old is Dick Wolf?!
3. Been watching Perception where the lead character has delusions. The main delusion is of a woman he met years ago. This season that woman, Dr. Newsome, is part of the show as the real person and the delusion and the love triangle is between those three. Wow. Crazy does work on TV.

Sometimes being lazy is important. You cannot go 1,000 MPH for 10 years without that taking a serious toll on your mind, body, and spirit. Likewise you can’t hit full stop without slowing down first. As I tear into yet another slice of Cotsco lemon cake, I realize I’ve hit full stop. I’m happier for it. I took the time to let the batteries wind to empty and now I need them to wind up again.

The trick is to build up slowly. If I launch into full work mode then the best I can expect is a dead start, like a car that has idled for too long. In truth I want to spend the month of July revving up for August and the month of August getting up to full speed. I might’ve been a Porsche when I was younger but these days I’m a 4 door sedan.

Some Thoughts:

1. Miley Cyrus is not a sex symbol. Neither are the Olsen twins nor is Amanda Bynes. Being wealthy, legal, skinny, and blonde doesn’t automatically qualify you for sexy status. The fact that we continue to behave as if it does is a real testament to how ingrained this ideal is into the American culture.
2. We had our first Haboob of the season last night. My driveway looked like a dust swell this morning.
3. Under the Dome is basically unrecognizable t this point. I think I will enjoy it more if I stop trying to make it something it isn’t: An awesome Stephen King story.

My eldest asked to have his own room. Part of me is ecstatic to see him growing into a young man and the rest of me is terrified to see him grow up. He won’t be my little boy for long. So when he said he wanted his own room I tackled it the way I do most parenting situations. I said no, then I thought about it for a while, and finally I figured out a way to throw money at the problem.

I realized that his first initial, R, is that of my favorite DC hero, Robin. It gave me a design element to work off of and a way to deflect the emotion of this major step forward into a design project he and I can work on together and be really happy about. The fact of the move is my boy is getting older and wants his own space. He attributes the move to a need to sleep in total darkness (absent night lights), something that won’t happen with his two younger brothers sharing a space with him. I know it is more than that. I know he wants his privacy on occasion and he doesn’t get that opportunity with dem franchize boys  hanging off his bed railing. My wifey thinks the whole thing is folly and he’ll give up on the idea of his own space pretty quickly. She challenged him to sleep in the perspective room for one month alone to see what would happen. He agreed and moves in tomorrow.

30 days of anything is a challenge. I’m looking forward to see how the boy handles his.

Some Thoughts:

1. The beautiful thing about a new month is a clear calendar that presents 30 straight days to form new habits. In honor of the wife’s challenge I am relaunching a challenge to myself. 30 days of exercise. Lets see how it works.

The film Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close opens with a monologue that supposes there  are more people alive now than have died in the entirety of human history. The character goes on to suggest there will eventually be no place left to bury all the bodies. It set me to thinking about the dead, and the living and the matter that composes us all. For much of early humanity our dead were returned to nature–buried or burned or set to sea or any combination of these things. Few were entombed in such a way that their matter could not escape. Whereas the film wonders whether or not we will have space for the dead, I wonder if all the matter that composes the dead will eventually limit our ability to create the living.

Call it a fool’s postulate, but if matter can neither be created nor destroyed and the Earth’s matter is finite, burying people in the way we do limits the amount of renewable matter that can be used to create life. It doesn’t necessarily mean that eventually we’ll run out of matter–everything being consumed by the human form being locked into these canisters of the dead and stored away like so much dried goods. It means that matter intervening with earth in the form of asteroids and other space debris will at some point become the primary matter component for all earth life.

I suppose that will make future generations aliens to our own planet.

We are at the point in this country where people grow up wanting to be famous as opposed to wanting to be something. Fame itself has become a talisman that people laud. I am shocked to live in a world where Kim Kardashian appears in a split screen photo with Kate Middleton. I am even more shocked to recognize that there is a since of royal parity there. In Great Britain they turn to those of royal blood as exemplars of what we are supposed to want to be or at least follow. I suppose a core difference is that we can simultaneously praise and dismiss the Kardashians, which is the American way, while such a thing seems very un-British to do towards the royal family.

When did fame itself become the driving factor for so many Americans? Was it the rise of reality TV and shows like Minute to Win It that require no useful skillset in order to be successful, or was it earlier in the days of the western gold rush and the get rich quick schemes? At some point a switch flipped and our social consciousness was locked into the upper class mode. Suddenly we decided that there were jobs we were too good for and relegated that work to a ‘lower class’ of people. We filled our need for recognition with stuff and in that stuff we found meaning and purpose and value. We needed to know what stuff to buy, so we turned to the TV and those on it as exemplars of what to buy, wear, eat, do, even think.

We used to turn to books. I miss those times.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. When things aren’t right at work it sticks in your mind like gum under a desk. It feels worse when you can’t do anything about it.

Contextualization.

I never liked math, or most science classes. I never even went to English in college. It cost me a shot at staying on the football team, but outside of that outside motivation, I couldn’t find a reason to go to the class that I eventually ended up teaching. The reason I hated the course was taught in a bubble. Nothing I did in english or in any other basic course save for sociology offered real world implications. Students who learn in a bubble tend to have limited ability to transfer that knowledge to other activities. In other words, you learn how to write an essay or do a math problem, or memorize a list of elements without understanding how those can be used outside of the classroom or in any other classroom for that matter.

Contextualization means building the course content around a context that the students can actively relate to. They are learning to a purpose that should be executed by the end of the semester. In other words, you are teaching students through a context that allows them to learn how to transfer those skills to other classes, activities, purposes, etc.

39 NFL arrests in 2012.  32 more since the 2013 Super Bowl.

There are around 2,560 players on NFL rosters today, which means roughly 1.5% of all players in the NFL are up on charges. Now as a percentage compared to the 1 out of 32 Americans under correctional supervision, the NFL stacks up favorably to the country as a whole, but that is not the standard the NFL is measured against. The National Football League is measured against the ever shifting landscape of public opinion. In that landscape the perception that players are criminals does not fly.

A few years ago Mike Vick, a quarterback, was convicted of several crimes relating to animal abuse. He lost not only his job and endorsements but became a pariah, thrust upon the platform of public opinion and hung there until his bones bleached in the sunlight. Somehow he came back from that, despite the longstanding perception that people care more for animals than other people. Vick survived because he was humble and he is a damn good player in the all-star role of the league. Aaron Hernandez isn’t going to be that fortunate.

Hernandez, formerly a Tight End for the New England Patriots, was arrested today on murder and obstruction of justice charges. He is charged with killing a man and dumping the body in the woods a mile away from his home. Hernandez was released hours after charges were filed. He plead not-guilty, and based on American law, he is not yet guilty. Based on the law of public opinion, the dude is already done.

The thing about being an icon is that you have to appear as you are expected to appear at all times. The moment that facade cracks, the world cracks down on you. It happened to Paula Deen, it is happening to Hernandez. Sooner or later these icons will learn that they gave up their right to be normal humans when they signed the big contract.