Month: January 2013

There should be an award for slacking; perhaps we can have an all star team that earn jerseys or little stickers in a notebook. I use we because I mean me. See, I am slacking hard this weekend, falling into every plausible excuse to not work this evening. The highly unfortunate aspect of this enterprise is that I have real and critical work that needs doing. It will get done tonight, likely at the sacrifice of some other endeavor like exercise. I gotta find that core intrinsic motivator to bust through the slacker gene. Maybe it isn’t enough to want to be a non-slacker to make your kids non-slackers.

I wish there was a quickie, stomach severing way of getting my head in a permanent good space, but if there were I suspect it wouldn’t be worth it at all. I want to reach into my inner psyche and pull out all of that really good stuff lurking in there that I seem to have lost access to. There is still a lot I can grab onto and produce, but the best stuff–the truly original mindbending goodness– is lost to me for now.

When I uncork that bottle of bad, oh lordy. Just gotta find my way back in.

 

I’m pushing the veil here–in a sense–trying to catch up to the wake of the tech wave, moving the talisblog into a realm of relevance, or at least technological basicness. Its a made up word. I’ve been hovering around a lot of those since a new faculty member joined our happy little all star team at CGCC. The main problem has been the way I set up the blog. I built it into a subdirectory called 10minutes. I want to rebuild the entire site through wordpress, but that is harder than it seems.

In the end it took about 5 minutes of concentrated effort to locate the proper line of code and make talislegger.com the point page. This could up traffic a bit and give me, maybe, one or two readers. Of course that means the blog needs to make some sense now, and I, infinitesimal writer, need to create content of value. This is the inherent cost of a thing like writing a blog. People expect it to mean something.

Even it it only means that you’re writing at all.

Another great show ends. Fringe ended tonight. I am watching the final hour as a write this. The beauty of the show was its willingness to look beyond the pale in an almost syberpunk-esque tribute to the x-files and the notion that technology serves as but a gateway to our greater understanding of the elemental forces of reality. The show bent time, space, and dimension to bring us the story of a man who love his boy so much that he was willing to break the multiverse to get him back. He did break it, breaking his fragile mental state in the process and leading to a series of weird events that ended in the invasion of our reality by evolved beings from the future.

I don’t know how it ends, but I know I have enjoyed the ride. I possess only a handful of really great shows. Oz, The Wire, Babylon 5, BSG, X-Files, Fringe. Perhaps others fall into place among the six, but right now these are what spring to mind as the purest examples of shows that play across seasons in a way that is deeply linked and enjoyable.

Television is an important part of my life. More than an escape it is a lens through which I see stories. Stories are everything to me. Sometimes I wish I could just sit and tell stories the way I used to. I have no idea why it is so much harder now, but perhaps the key is to do more of it and shed the burden of perfection in the doing.

985 days ago I started forming the habit of writing every day. This was a tough habit to form, but given that I only needed to write for 10 minutes, I was able to make it a part of myself and something that nags at me until I have done it. Breaking this habit is possible still. It is only a few years young and is only now becoming a part of my nature. Other habits, ones that I have struggled with for years, are harder to break. Worst still, breaking habits requires a degree of dedication hat is difficult for anyone to muster.

I am overweight. I am not fat, mostly, but I am larger than I should be. 213 lbs at last check, which is 15 more than I desire and at least that much heavier than I can be and still be a functional football player (we won’t talk about the damn drops over the last few weeks. I am taking a week off to get my head right). Getting in better shape means breaking several habits. I would need to monitor what I eat, which I do not. Make healthy food a priority, which I don’t. Be diligent about exercise, which I struggle to even care about at this point.

The point is that I understand why people cannot get back in shape. It isn’t just one thing. It requires the disassembly of several habits that created the conditions for poor health. Each habit builds on the next and the way we are taught about getting healthy is to attack all the poor habits at once. I cannot see how that is effective. I think a smarter solution would be to identify the individual habits that combine to form the negative behavior. Work on one habit at a time, in a reversal of the habit forming strategy (30 days at a time). Take care of the easiest first. If this can be done then you ca chip away at the problem slowly and maneuver towards a lasting success.

I shared the 10 minute rule with some students today. Not the blog itself (as that would be egotistical) but the idea of it. These are all novel writing students who struggle with the words. The words don’t come fast enough. the words come too fast. There is no time to record them. There is no time to summon the writing. There is no time to write.

I asked them to take 10 minutes minimum out of each day and write. I know that for some this will be a challenge, as it was for me. For others it will be an opportunity to solidify that wealth of talent that lives within them. A chance to open the vault doors at let slip the tide of fiction. Or non fiction as the case may be.

I am struck by the abundance of words within them. I am struck by this as I struggle with the production of my own words yet again. As the walls of deadline loom before me and the 20th looks down with dark eyes I ask, How can I get the words? How indeed?

Perhaps I should stop self-sabotaging. I should put mind to work ahead of habit and distraction and call forth the working thoughts of a man who knows his craft and his skill and his depth of person and character before I, infinitely smaller than he, forget who he is, which is me, which is meant to be he again.

I am of course rambling incoherently. Sometimes such things are necessary to get the junk out before the goodness can flow freely. That and pancakes do a good writer make.

A smoother way to day it would be, overextended.
I am certain that this is a flaw of giving people, a flaw of intelligent people, and a flaw of egotistical people. I am one or more of those types of people and I wholly possess the flaw of overextension. The thing is, I believe I can accomplish everything and anything I set my mind to. However, I take on so much that I often limp through these accomplishments and in that downgrade the opinion that others hold of me.

Here are the facts: I am teaching 7 classes this semester. I am also the Lead Faculty for developmental education. I am also the faculty liaison for the writing center. I am also coaching two flag football teams and assistant coaching a baseball team. I am working on a novel. I am working on some writing for a video game. I am working on some writing for a role playing game. All of these things in addition to being a father and a husband who needs to find time to exercise, sleep, and otherwise take care of himself. Obviously, I am overextended. The problem is I am unwilling to give up any of the wonderful work I do. My answer has always been scheduling, but the scheduling fails to account for me time, and when I become overwhelmed, I allow the me time to dominate everything and the other stuff gets neglected.

Where is the balance? It lives in a place just outside of my reach right now. It languishes in a book or a Ted talk, or a therapists couch, somewhere I have yet to access. On the other hand, I look at some of the incredible people of our world and what they do and ask myself this: if they can do it, why can’t I?

Then I double down and put more on the plate.

Yesterday I talked about a girl, and afterwards watched a bit of The Butterfly Effect. That sensation she has at the end of the movie, that is what I feel from time to time. Right now I am feeling busy. Tired too. This may be the first night I sleep before 2 am in months. But this blog is not about burnout. This is about juggling the many lives one is made to juggle. For me there are 4.

The first life is the one that begins at 6 am with tears and yawns and was for breakfast. It rises with the sun and carries through the early morning. This is the life of fatherhood, where you are dad and coach, and provider of playtime glee. Where your body is reshaped into a jungle gym and your ears swell with peals of laughter. I love the life of a parent despite how hard it can be. I love the second life as well, the life that is introduced in a 30 minute stretch of blacktop and ferried into existence on a soundtrack of audiobooks and NPR. This is the work life. It is satisfying and fun. There are pointless political games and emotionally dangerous students, but these pitfalls are part of the life’s landscape. When I come home there is the 1st life again and it gives way to a third life–the life of a husband.

We don’t have many of these precious moments any longer. Between study and kids we can hardly sit down for more than a TV show or desperate quickie. This is the neglected life in some aspects, and it is the one that is meant to sustain me through the other 3.

The fourth life begins as her day ends. This is the solitary life. This is the writing life, where I come to the page each time as a newbie, hoping to carve something useful out of the tide of human experience and emotion we are all so fortunate to be a part of. This is the soul’s playtime.

I always enjoy this part.

I’m puzzled about this one. I’m in Lakeshore Learning with my middle kid and this lady walks in holding a baby. I’m staring. I’m struck. I’m frozen. She’s attractive, but that is not it. There is something chemical there. Something genetic and old like a familiarity that reaches back through time and grabs hold of me and shoves me into neutral. This could have been an hour or a split second, but she notices me and smiles. I smile. We both move on. I don’t really move on, because I cannot for the life of me understand what the hell that was. Fact is, I wasn’t even attracted to the woman in that way. I just felt like I knew her on some cellular level and there was a connection there.

I’ve felt that a few times in my life, mostly with females. It is a sense of kizmet that feels born from some past life. The first time I thought it was a relationship thing, but it isn’t that at all. I don’t know for sure what it is or how it intersects with my life. I know that it is weird, and confusing, and uncomfortable when it happens. The thing is, I don’t know what to do about it or how to control it.

I wonder how I look to other people. I know that in the weekend games I am one of the last picked and one of the most avoided offensive targets, often pushed off to play lineman. So in this case I am seen as as a scrub–especially given my inability to block. On the other hand, I am the smartest guy on the field (and not very humble) and I can learn any position they throw at me. An offensive guy all my life, I find that I play more and more defense ball with these guys and I’ve struggled.

But that is tangential. See, I know they feel like I am slow and old, but I only partially feel it. I want to record myself running routes, so I can see my speed and improve it. All the reading I do about the subject is useless if I don’t actually get out there and do some running. Who knows when? Heck, I can hardly find time to add new things to my plate. And time, as always, is running out.

I also wish I could see myself from the student perspective. Ratemyprofessor helps, but that is overwhelmingly negative. Maybe that is the whole story, but I feel like a lot of students do not have the desire to post unless angry, so while there is a lot of bad, there is little good and that is fine for the medium. I wonder how the coworkers view me, but there is hardly a way to tell there.

I suppose I can worry and wonder for all of my life, but I can never really know. So, what is the point of worrying?

Its funny how the choices you make keep coming round and again. In a way those choices are a reflection of who you are and come back because they are representative of what you will do again. The other day my Division Chair asked me if I planned on slowing down any time soon. I teach the maximum number of classes (counting overload hours), which means that I am working very hard to make ends meet in order to compensate for the lack of funding in the family. It also means that burnout is always only a heartbeat away.

I’m not there yet.

Maybe I’ll find some new and deeper strength from all of this. Maybe I am pushing my engine to the max in order to find yet another gear that I can rev up into. Maybe, just maybe, I have no idea how much I can take before utter and total collapse.