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More Minecraft talk.

My friend Ryan introduced me to the term Honey-do list. It is a collection of tasks a spouse assigns their significant other when that other is supposed to be on vacation. My Honey-do list stretches off into the distance like the yellow brick road. Some of those do’s are self-directed like the garage. On the other hand, the complaints about that space are so visceral that something needs to be done regardless of who initiates the request. I find having these tasks to be a really calming thing. There is a simplicity in work that requires your hands more than your mind, and when it comes to summer I prefer to be a highly physical individual.

I stopped writing for three weeks and called it recovery. Maybe it is. After all, you need to recover from a physical workout, so why not take the time to let the mind heal? There were other factors involved, namely the end of semester grading, that kept me away from the page. I’m headed back over the next few days but being away really made some stuff clear. One thing I now know is that writing is my main drug. In the absence of that drug I’ve been finding other indulgences. I’ve cheated on my new eating habits so prolifically that I’m all the way back to 207lbs. I was near 200 before the food rush hit.

Some Thoughts:

1. The posts are indeed getting shorter. This is less the sign of an empty mind than a cluttered one. More to come in the near future.
2. Last night of binging…

The name Olivia Sprauer might not fly to the front of your memory. She’s been seen on a newscast or two recently, because she was just fired from her H.S. teaching job. She was fired for being beautiful and sharing that beauty. According to the school, she was fired for modeling semi-nude. Basically, she does bikini shots–the stuff we drool over on cnnsi.com. Supposedly that sort of work makes her unfit to be a teacher. It is the same story over and again. We have become a nation with a very strange relationship with sex and sexuality. We want to see it but we don’t quite want to admit sex is a part of what drives us.

Some Thoughts:

1. The Knicks have done everything I could hope them to do this season. The last hurdle is to get past the Pacers to play the Heat. I almost don’t want to see it happen, because the Heat will destroy them. Let the Pacers catch that beatdown instead.
2. I’m starting to get a handle on this coaching thing–not so much how to do it, but what needs to be done.

I’m struggling with parenting now at the moment I have a sliver of freedom (however brief). I get a week–4 days really. Tuesday through friday I am going to get some quality me time that will consist of a movie or two, lots of mine crafting, cleaning, and quite likely the construction of a novel outline. I also intend to schedule out the rest of my summer. There is a lot I need to get done in terms of summer opportunities and tying up loose ends. The biggest thing is paperwork. I’m terrible at that stuff, and I recognize it is the biggest part of the administrative role I seek to have in the distant future.

Beyond the professional stuff, I am struggling with the parenting stuff. My kids are crazy whiny right now. All three are looking to override parental rulings with the power of screams and tears. No such luck, but the behaviors are taking years off my life.

I need a vacation.

Long day-ong weak that has left me miserably draned and unable to focus concentratin. I think there is a lesson in that somewhere….
Just not tonight

Chrissy Teigen is a beautiful woman. Her and her ilk represent many corporations’ idea of what beautiful is. I can’t say they are wrong. I can say that this limited group of women are creating a host of insecurities in the world around them–no matter how much good they try to do.

Men want to be athletes and women want to be models. These are our ascribed gender roles. The man is meant to be strong and fearless. The woman is meant to be lauded over. Although we continue to push towards an evolved state of being, said evolution is held up by this simple dynamic. Being a model means being rewarded and ushered into a world where you do little more than support this dynamic. Being an athlete is the same thing, but I’ve been so heavily socialized that it is near impossible for me to separate my personal desires from the idea of athletics and what they mean. I suppose if I were a female, I’d have the same problem with athletics that as a male I have with modeling. Being an athlete defaults you–supposedly–to being a good guy. Being a model–supposedly–defaults you to being a prize possession and the kind of girl you want to keep forever. Yet here’s the rub: I don’t know anything about Teigen outside of her looks and the fact that her fiance is a bad ass singer (John Legend). The rest is assumptions created b a society that values these symbols (model, athlete) at a very high level.

That sounds pretty dangerous to this talislegger.

10 Thoughts I think I think:

1. In case you missed it, the Miami Heat pulverized the Chicago Bulls. At one point the defending champions led by 46 points. That’s a college-style beat down. At this level of the game if you can embarrass another team that badly you are a real force to be reckoned with. To make matters worse, they basically put on that spanking over less than 2 quarters and chilled out the rest of the time. The lead came as a result of a 62-20 run that left the Bulls players feeling rather dumb and angry. Half a dozen Chicago technical fouls followed.
2. Minecraft is a seriously cool game. I’ve been experimenting with Redstone–the in-game equivalent of circuitry and I am learning how to make all kinds of interesting contraptions as I construct my ‘Batcave’
3. The new Pokemon Online update is not compatible with my version of IOS. Maybe that is a good thing…
4. Jodi Arias asked for the death penalty (in a way). I say she’s speaking out of anger. I didn’t follow the case, so I have no opinion on what she deserves. I’m just glad it is almost over. Besides, Amanda Knox is back in the spotlight. We have our Femme Fatale right there.
5. 4 weeks and no tax return. Come on, son.
6. Yeah, I copped the title From Peter King, but if you read the first 700 or so posts, you know that it is basically a homage to an incredible journalist. There is just something so prolific about writers named King. Maybe I ought to change my name.

When I was a kid I had a particularly frightening encounter with a spirit. The thing manifested itself first as a voice that whispered loudly to me from inside my pillow. Afterwards I began to see and hear things that weren’t quite there. Worst still, I started gaining perceptions of things I had no natural way of perceiving. I believe in ghosts based on my experiences. I don’t think what happened was anything magical or extra-scientific. I believe my experiences are easily explainable as a form of enhanced perception that, IMHO, is more common to children for reasons I have no formal understanding of. I think that as I move closer to death, I push away my connection to that realm. I fight it more. So, now I can’t sense dead people, but I still believe they exist. Likewise, the existence of Aliens seems to me to be a given, and people just won’t accept it. So we are left with a particular quandary: Do we dismiss the existence of these things that are outside our understanding simply because there is no evidence, or do we accept that there are things in life that we don’t understand but can still be real.

I know ghosts are real. I believe in life after death. Here’s why: In a finite universe there is a finite amount of energy that powers the expansion of said universe–unless we go with the dark energy as extra-universal energy theory. Given that the energy cannot be created or destroyed and that energy powers life, it stands to reason that the energy that created us will continue on. Now, reaching past the energy question into the realm of memory, we are left to consider if what we call ‘life’ is merely a collection of memories. Will those survive the cessation of flesh? I can’t say. I can hope and dream that our memories are more than a result of electrochemical impulse and imprint. I have reason to believe both sides. On the one hand, even snowflakes posses uniquely encoded patterns that suggest that once created in the ‘verse, those patterns cannot be repeated, meaning they are somehow preserved. On the other hand, pi supposedly holds every number combination in existence and as such would serve as that record keeping format.

Which brings me to Aliens. Back to the pi connection, if our DNA sequence is encoded into pi, it is reasonable to suspect that the sequence for every possible organism exists in that record and, if we can decode start and stop points (I suggest we start with our own general DNA string), we could find an alien’s sequence and recode it to create an alien. Crazy talk for sure, but is it any more crazy than believing a really, really old white guy with an epic beard built the world in 7 days?

If most of the world is willing to accept the existence of God, why then is the existence of a separate species so hard to swallow?

10 minutes up…

1. If you are one of nearly 150 million Americans involved in the school system in some fashion, the school year is coming to an end. A proud crop of seniors will be graduating to the next level, and us on the teaching side of the equation will be taking time off. The upside for everyone else? Traffic will be greatly reduced, and vacations will be plentiful.

2. Odds are you smiled today. That smile comes for a variety of reasons, each of them belonging solely to you. As corny as it sounds, every day that we smile provides us motivation to make it another day.

3. Superman can’t possibly be as underwhelming as Iron Man III. Zack Snyder just isn’t that guy.

4. The Knicks are going to disappoint a great number of people very shortly. New York will be pissed on a near Sanchez-level. Haters rejoice.

5. You aren’t dead yet.

6. If you are dead, the worst is over.

7. You are reading the nearly 1100th post from a writer who spent decades being lazy and unmotivated. Yet here we are hurtling towards year three and there’s not an ounce of quit in me. If I can do this, then I feel like anyone can get off their butt and succeed. Smile on that.

8. You aren’t Jodi Arias.

9. Jodi Arias didn’t shoot you, nor were you captured by a weird hispanic dude and forced into sexual slavery for a decade. There’s that.

10. There’s this too: We all have the ability in this country to change our lives and change our station. Things can always be worse.

On a night where 3 women missing for a decade turned up alive, I finally looked up and saw the stars. I haven’t stepped very far out of my bubble lately, and knowing that there can be a happy ending in life encouraged me to think past today and consider tomorrow. I’m happy now, but when I think about how woefully underprepared I am for the future, I get sad about it. Tonight was different. I looked up and saw thousands of stars and thought about how beautiful and meaningful all of that is. We’re on this strange little planet hurtling away from the beginning of everything at unimaginable speeds towards something equally unimaginable or perhaps nothing at all. The scope of it is frightening, and I think we all bury ourselves in our tiny lives and fall into our problems, which may be profound, and forget that we are all together as part of this great starship and we are on a trajectory that we neither understand nor appreciate.

I don’t know where we are going. I know I won’t be around to see it. So, I suppose it is meaningless to worry about it. At the same time, I think we all secretly wish there were something more, a goal for humanity to strive for together, for when we work together we don’t waste our energy destroying each other.