Month: May 2013

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.

Well into the morning I found my way back to the blog. I spent most of the day cleaning and sorting out the remains of my colored past. I think we Americans have garages because we aren’t sure how to unpack our mental baggage. Instead of trying we keep mementos of the past to serve as touchstones to power a memory or emotion. I don’t want to carry those with me. I want to move forward and enjoy every moment in my present life. The past is what it was and I cannot change that. There is little value in reliving it.

So where is my today? I’m learning to forgive and forget. The poet Myrlin Hepworth says we communicate primarily to give love or receive love. He goes on to say the opposite of love is hate–the want of love. Last week a friend and faculty member stabbed me in the back. It hurt like hell and took me days to get past. I’m over it. I will not trust them again, but I do forgive them. Fool me once, shame on you. I refuse to be fooled again. I also refuse to let it affect how I feel about where I work.

That statement right there is emotional growth. Life is far too short to be held back by a thirsty quest for vengeance. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Every time my middle kid plays sports or interacts with kids when I am around, he becomes a hopeless prick. However, if I am not around and he is interacting, playing, etc, he is an angel sent down from the heavens. I have to believe the controlling factor in this situation is me. He chooses to act out when I am around, but I have no idea why. This is the difficult parenting moment I suppose all parents face. Do I focus on disciplining the behavior out of him, or do I provide basic discipline and seek to understand the root of the issue?

I recognize the need to discipline unacceptable behavior. I also believe the behaviors children exhibit come as a result of imitation or as a way to express what words fail to do. I want to know why he acts like a prick around us parents and like a doll when with others. There has to be something there, Boundaries perhaps?

I haven’t slept since hours before the last post. My wife insists I become mentally impaired when going without sleep. Now I’m watching Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds and wondering what to write about. I won’t cover Iron Man III until after I see it a second time. I feel the structure of a trilogy deserves a post all its own. I will say the film was surprising and inventive without loosing any of Iron Man’s special charm.

In fact, that is all I’ll say on anything tonight. Fresh start tomorrow.

I started playing Minecraft a few weeks ago and realized that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. Here’s what I knew: I can build amazing things, and–crap a monster got me! Once I understood the game more and recognized what amazing constructions could be forged, I started seeing Minecraft as a teaching tool. I realized that minecraft is about being rewarded for hard work–and occasionally slaying beasts.

This morning I set about building a massive underwater city. This sort of thing happens in phases, so I am starting the first phase of the process by creating a staging area and trying to understand how to build an airlock. I am learning about the physics of the game and working towards a self directed goal. Likewise, I am showing my kids how to set their own goals and develop a plan to get there. We are learning important life tools and learning how to be rewarded for their hard work all through playing a simple block-based video game. The next step will be to transfer that knowledge to a real life experience. We will take that step this summer when we build a playhouse together.

Recently the Syfy network concluded a massive marketing campaign with the simultaneous release of their new series, Defiance and the companion multi-platform game. If you look at the show from a pure story/plot perspective, Defiance isn’t very good. However, modern television and movies are not about the purity of the tale, or else The Big Lebowski would be the best film of the last few decades. No, Defiance makes its fans the way everyone else does, through the smoke and mirrors of CG, a modicum of powerful acting, and a relationship that demands the viewer’s attention.

 

Defiance looks good. This is not the Saturday afternoon computer graphics of Earthquake! or any number of other made for Syfy films. The digital effects are precise and largely believable, belying a budget dedicated to such things. This should come as no surprise from the network that dedicated an hour-long series to creature effects. Less inventive is the lore behind the effects. Defiance tells the tale of a future Earth that is invaded by a multitude of races in what appears to be a Noah’s ark-esque tale. Through yet undivulged means, the humans fought back as one (or more) of these races was in the process of terraforming the planet. The space ships crashed to the planet and the races are now forced to live in harmony. This all took place in the time it took for a pre-teen to grow into middle age. This thin plot device leaves the audience flat and largely uninspired. Still, when you look at the individual races, the cool factor keeps you glued to the screen.

 

Thus far the best acting and best relationships stem from a small cadre of actors central to the storyline. There is a madame, vaguely reminiscent of the ‘companion’ role from firefly, a bounty hunter/tracker/ex-soldier turned Sheriff, also vaguely reminiscent of the lead from firefly. Finally, there is his adopted daughter, a girl from a violent and outcast race—a girl who suffered as a child and was rescued by this soldier made sheriff. Therein lies the story. The rest of the plot feels silly and put on, but the one genuine thing about this series is the emerging father-daughter relationship, and the struggle these two have to survive in this crazy, mixed up world.

Watch Defiance. Enjoy the CG. Stay for the father-daughter conflict. Don’t expect the story to last terribly long, because there isn’t much of a story being told. However, watching this relationship play out just might be worth the time.

 

I’m tired of coaching. It isn’t the act of coaching–I love the kids and the fun and the excitement. I am tired of being responsible. It happens, people. Once in a while you get to the point where you just want to let go and be absolved of responsibility. Part of the beauty of my job is that I get a month out of the year to do that. Once the season ends and the school year ends I intend to dive headlong into novel work, forgetting any idea of responsibility. I am fully aware it wont last forever, but the minutes I have are so valuable to me that it makes everything else worthwhile.

So, what does a writer do with the free time?

Movies, lesson planning, and a whole bunch of plotting. I have a major novel in the works that I needed to put on hold towards the end of 2012, and this gives me a chance to revisit and update that project. It also lets me take a step back and evaluate a great deal of what I want to accomplish in 2013 and 2014 as a writer. Every successful writer sets goals. I have not done that since 2010, and I believe it is fundamental to shaping your writing career. You can’t know where you are going unless you map it out.

The fun begins Thursday night with Iron Man III, and from there it is off to write!