Month: August 2012

I have sighed more in the past 8 days than at any other point in my life. Every breath leaves my throat heavily. There is a lot on my mind, from starting classes to stories due to kids, inability to spend time with the wifey, heck even the suck that is the Jets fills my soul. The fact is I am tired. I am not overwhelmed or overworked, I am merely tired and have not taken a rest in a very long time.

Tonight’s work is limited to two syllabi and the 1st week of a hybrid course. I am less concerned with the in-class stuff than I am with getting everything published in time. Worst of all, the motivation simply isn’t there. I don’t want to do it, because I’m too worn out on the teaching front. Of course I’ll get it done. I always do.

I might need some Ice Cream and pie first though.

Some Thoughts:

1. Had a chance to listen to the GOP response to the Akin comments about ‘Legitimate Rape’ and whether or not a woman’s body could discern the difference and somehow prevent itself from getting pregnant should the intercourse not be ‘legitimate’. GOP is still in lock step with the talking points. Everyone asked said some variation of this statement: ‘he should spend 24 hours considering what will best help the country at this critical time.” (Romney). Who knows where the talking points come from?

To begin, there will be no Beyblade party. Not yet. The kids and I ran a ‘proof of concept’ in-house tourney that ended with the 3yr old assault his brothers with a Bey. I can only imagine this playing out with a 24+ kid bracket. Maybe I need to scale up slowly; invite a few kids over to blade and go from there. I ordered a dozen Beys from China, just for the chance to actually order something from China.

Beys dominated my thoughts last night and class dominated my thoughts today. Less than a full night’s sleep before the 17 week crazy train kicks into gear. I’ve gone to organizational tools–Handouts, Powerpoints–to get me on track. I’m not ready to deliver information about the syllabus, but I am ready to teach.

It occurs to me that as we age our perceptions change. As perception is reality, our reality changes. We work hard to design scientific principles that support our ever-shifting reality, but the truth is that we don’t know what we don’t know. We have the power to lie to ourselves, to color perception in order to feel like things are as we want (or simply need on some psychological level) them to be. How else can a girl living on a dirt floor of a shack filled with HIV positive siblings and parents be happier than most people I know? Her perception of her life and situation is different from what we experience in this country, from what many individuals here experience, etc. Her perception is better.

Wayne Hunter’s perception isn’t so hot. His skills are worse than his perception. I’ve joined the sports pundits in calling the dude a turn style. He cannot protect the QB and is likely to get someone hurt. For this reason, I feel the Jets need to get a new RT or start Tebow. The big guy can operate out of the pocket–a necessary skill when the pocket is ripped.

I love a good party. I love going to one and I especially love throwing one. Every few years my eldest shifts his behavior far enough into the green to have a party. Now, on the eve of his eighth birthday, I find myself communicating with companies in China in hopes of procuring Beyblades wholesale. Why? I think this year’s party is going to be an all out Beyblade tournament!

Beyblade is a game and TV Series that was popular a few years back and is currently experiencing a resurgence amongst select kids from 4-12. The game is a trumped up version of tops. You purchase a metal top and a plastic stadium and you spin your top in hopes of surviving longer than your opponent. I’ve tried the game with varying degrees of success. It lacks the poker-like strategy of Pokemon, but it is pure physics. The tops have a finite number of variables that determine weight, spin direction, defensive posture, attack speed, etc. You can change out parts and create a bey that does what you want it to do and in a team battle the variables and strategy increase.

This is going to be a fun one.

Listening to Sabriel and Pao cover Gnarls Barkley in a sweet, soulful way reminds me of how powerful music can be. Music is said to be a top memory trigger; right up there with sense of smell. Music transports me to the past, but I also think it defines eras in our lives. Thriller (Jackson) was an era. As Time Goes By. Everyone can tie a significant period of their lives to a song. It may not be the pop hits of America, but there is a collection of sounds that form the melody of our lives.

My songs largely come from Boys II Men, Bon Jovi, Jason Mraz, and Biggie Smalls. There was that period where D’Angelo laid down the soundtrack to all of my amorous affairs. There was the dark period when I fell victim to Slayer and their ilk, only to float back to the surface of normality with Metallica.

These days I groove to the tunes of Maroon 5, Kanye West and Jay Z. Jason Mraz is always on the playlist, and it could be he more than any other that defines my 30s.

Some Thoughts:

1. Survived the week before school with minor scrapes and bruises. No significant sleep occurred, and I did jam about a year’s worth of pedagogy into my brain over a 84 hr stretch. How much will stick? At least all the stuff that made it into my syllabi

Chad “ochocinco” Johnson is a man without a home. His wife took everything in his private life and his professional life was stripped away by the Miami Dolphins. Now, Coach Philbin claims the release was about more than the alleged abuse. I believe him. Watching Hard Knocks taught me that Johnson has lost confidence in his ability more than anything else. He is a receiver in need of a revival, and a place like Miami, where he would be the feature, is not it. Johnson needs a team with a solid, established QB and a system built around simple routes, and YAC yardage with a seasoned qb who can bring him back to where he needs to be.

Yes, I am talking about Manning. He can rescue the kid better than any. The Jets would not work at all, but the Broncos and the Texans are the teams I see benefiting from an ochoing.

Some thoughts:
1. Here is a bit of web laundry. I am seriously considering moving the old talislegger site to this medium in order to unify the site experience. It is a laundry matter, because it merely involves putting in the work to get it done. More importantly, it is about finding the time to do so and preserve some of the awesome imagery that reflects the web stuff I have gathered.

2. I have not been very loyal about the reflection and waivers from the perspective of the days these things happen. Sounds like something that should be solidified, but when an idea hits…

There is a moment where I don’t know him. When his eyes squeeze shut in anger. When disappointment colors his cheeks red and he howls at the the sky. The whole of him curls around my leg, maple skin soft, the flesh beneath not yet knotted by life’s travels. my skin is darker, traveled. My fingers knotted and knowing as they slither into that spot just above his breast.

I spent some time on the CNN.com site and then some more on the international version of the same, and fox news, and even msnbc. I was curious to know what qualifies as news these days. News, in the modern vernacular is merely what information is trending, or being viewed or noticed, enough to be considered headline news. This ‘news’ varies greatly from site to site. One key distinction was between CNN, where the headline story was an opinion piece questioning whether Paul Ryan was for or against Ayn Rand, and the Fox piece that, surprisingly, fact checks Paul Ryan’s budget plan claims.

All sites saved space for images and talk of Miley Cyrus’ side boob, which speaks volumes of the effect that sex has on the media conversation. However, the real interesting part is what constitutes news for these sites. Internet, and to a lesser degree television, news has a direct link to the customer and the customer’s reading habits. News is then filed, even created, according to the needs of the audience.

That is a scary reality. That means that there is no impartial baseline determining relevance based on universal criteria. Heck, maybe there never was.

Some thoughts:
1. Dr. David Katz, editor-in-chief of the journal Childhood Obesity is uncomfortable with the Nike commercial I mentioned yesterday. He doesn’t like how uncomfortable the kid looked and how far from great he is. Well, that is the damn point. Greatness demands sacrifice, and that kid inspires greatness.

I am genuinely looking forward to the semester if for no other reason to discuss the polarization of the American commercial. I say polarization because what I perceive to be as a greater divide between the way commercials are scripted these days. On one end of the spectrum we’ve gone off the deep end with the oversexualization and even the dumbing down of women. It didn’t start with Axe commercials, but they remain the greatest example (save for a handful of beer commercials that are simply nuts).

Axe actually plays both sides here. They recently released a new ad, which doesn’t show skinny ultra-attractive women. Instead in focuses on a man who turned a girl he liked into a  pedestal piece. He talks about how putting her upon high made him feel powerless and how he changed his behaviors, so he would never feel like that again. This is the other side of the media message. This idea of change comes from within is echoed by the Nike commercial that shows a fat kid striving to be healthy. These commercials are a small yet powerful counterweight to what we normally see, and what we normally see is getting more drastic.

A downside of posting from the iPad is the inability of the software to record a blog until it is actually posted online. I wrote this post much earlier in the day and a child took hold of the device before the post went to print. What followed was ten minutes of writing lost. I suppose tonight is the 20 minute rule. I also suppose the loss is fitting, because it echoes what I want to share.

What is a life well lived? According to Kobe Bryant it is a life that is about triumphing over adversity and achieving the dream. What happens to most of us is not the Kobe story, but a sadder refrain in which we constantly devolve our dreams until that are shallow husks of what we thought could be. Yet somehow we cling to these husks and attempt to call them a life well lived. Perhaps we she call them the chance not taken. This has been marinating for some time as an emerging theme in my coming fantasy novel (coming when I release it from the prison of my subconscious to run across the pages free). The revision of dreams and life happiness to something more manageable and reachable is nothing shy of an acceptable cop out.

I don’t mean to see the world die unhappy, but I wish people fought harder to become who they are truly meant to be. That fight, I believe, is a life well lived.

8:33 on a saturday sleepover night. I am quietly debating the virtues of being a shut in. The truth is If you have a big enough house and access to amazon.com the need to leave your house is greatly reduced. I have several friends who telecommute and I myself practice that lifestyle in the summer months. I realize this conversation is triggered by the sleepover. Having 4 boys in place makes one consider the life of a hermit. There was even a moment when I shoved them outside towards the evening sun, shut the door, and observed a very brief moment of silence.

My wife is searching online for weed killer. In her summer mode she turns into this green-thumbed goddess driven to make her house a better place. Now that summer is, in the work sense, a bemusing memory I wonder how long it will take for her to shift back into that hard charging student mode that also makes me smile.

Seriously, I am out of words tonight. I think this many kids in one space is damaging to the ability to think.