Month: June 2013

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.

I coach a lot of kids. I do it because I love watching them be successful. Tonight I watched my youngest shoot his first in-game basketball jump shot and it swished–nuthin but net. I loved that moment and immediately after his game I went to the other gym and watched a team my eldest will face at the end of the season. Seriously, those kids look like the Monstars and we don’t have Jordan. This got me thinking about coaching in general. I wanted to find a way to make practices go faster, get players more engaged, and help them get a lot better at their craft. Then I started to remember all of the times I tried to stick to a schedule of training my own kids and failed.

I have failed so many times at being consistent that it made me wonder why that happens so much and moreover, what the effect of that is on the kids. Call it the sponge effect. I picked up the habit of not following through from my mother and now my kids are picking it up from me. I’m focused on breaking the cycle and trying to figure out how to do that.

Culture is decided by the women.

Each day I find myself becoming more of a structural functionalist. The social theory, born in the thoughts of August Comte, suggests that all the parts of a society work together like an organism. What it therefore suggests is that extraneous parts can be detrimental, divisive, and even destructive. Now believing this to be true, I have always looked to figure out my place in that ‘organism’. Your job, role in family, role as a consumer, etc. defines your value in the macrosociological sense. Your financial contribution to the whole is the blood that pumps through the system.

Whenever I enter a new job, or consider my role in the family, community, etc. I do so from this perspective. What is my function in the overall mechanism and what then does my removal mean for that mechanism. This is, in a way, a high-falutent way of figuring out if I am valuable to people around me, which may seem egocentric but is necessary. The one commonality between biological systems and social ones is this: If you aren’t needed, you are dust.

The recent decision by the Food Network to remove Paula Deen from their network feels like the first left hook in a race war that should never happen. Deen, a buttery star of the network, was released from her association with the network due to allegations and testimony that shows she used racist statements at points in her life. This is far short from calling Deen a racist and someone who perpetuates hate. I choose to believe that she is neither of these things but instead is a woman born and raised in the south in a racist household, city, and state.

Deen admitted in testimony for a civil lawsuit that she used racial epitaphs such as ‘nigger’. She claimed to have used the language in direct relation to a man who held a gun to her head. Her comments suggest a woman who still sees ‘blacks’ as different; someone raised in a way that blacks were inherently a different group and one separate and perhaps inferior to herself. Now she also speaks to the fact that she evolved her viewpoint and doesn’t use that language and even goes so far to suggest her family won’t tolerate that language. This is evolution. This is what we want from people born into racism. So why is she being penalized for it?

What bothers me is that this could result in backlash. People could see this as a ‘why stop being racist’ moment and shift to a racist for life mode. After all, why try to change if there is no benefit to that change die to your past.

Some Thoughts:

1. The motivation isn’t there yet. On the bright side I did not go to McDonalds and buy the 6 apple pies I wanted. On an even brighter side I am starting to recognize that there are only so many distractions I can enjoy before my mind says enough.
2. Upon second viewing Prometheus has merit. The last 40 minutes are terrible, but everything up to that point is suspense filled and valid.

The big review should show up sometime next week in the Maricopan, so here is a 10 minute primer on what I expected, saw, and didn’t quite see. I expected Kate Beckinsale or another A-list star who folks would drool over as his wife. What I got was a woman who, while attractive in her own way, was there more for her Tony Award credentials than her supermodel credentials. What is important to recognize about World War Z is that it isn’t the kind of movie that will be emailed to the academy for screening. The film is meant to be a summer blockbuster and it delivers precisely what it is supposed to–to a point.

I expected to be underwhelmed by the zombies and by the action. I wasn’t. There were moments of shock and humor and general pleasure tittering throughout the crowd as the zombies got more screen time. That part of the movie delivered.

The parts that didn’t deliver? We’ll get to that on theMaricopan.com

Some Thoughts:

1. This lazy summer is incredibly rejuvenating and dangerous. I feel my working nature slipping further away…

2. I am running out of TV shows to watch!

3. I think monday marks the first time the kids will be on a real schedule. Hmm… maybe I ought to put myself on a schedule as well–at least a trial run for a week.

4. I’m not hot enough to be on one of these TV gameshows like 72 hrs. I need to change that, because I want to test myself in that arena.

In 2006 Congress based the Secure Fence Act, a bill that resonated with many as reminiscent of the Berlin Wall and perhaps even the Great Wall of China. In fact, the act did more than just provide funding and authority for an expansion of reinforced walls near the border and American population centers. It provided money for a study on the feasibility of such things–on the northern border.  As it turns out, that border is 3,987 miles of real estate as compared to a measly 1,933 on the south end. Given the length and cost of that border, it was clearly unfeasible to wall of that entire section of land. Besides, we only want to keep undesirables out, and undesirables don’t look like Canadians now do they?

The fact is the entire border security apparatus is, to a certain extent, an illusion. Walls and fences can no more keep a determined immigrant from entering our country than walls and fences can keep a determined criminal from entering your home. When your situation is bad enough, you will do anything to get out. Worst still, walls are symbolic gestures that tell those beyond the wall that they are not welcome. While some will tell you that walls suggest you are welcome if you come in the ‘right’ way, those same people fail to mention or perhaps even realize that the right way often doesn’t allow the people trying to come in to get in at all.

We, as a nation, don’t want immigrants from south of the border. This is not my personal opinion but a reflection of a shrinking majority viewpoint. The fear is twofold. On the one hand we are afraid that the incoming immigrants, unlike Canadians, will be unwilling to assimilate to our culture. The ‘us’ in that is the dominant caucasian American culture that created American government, American idealism, and strives to build these walls to exclude others. The second point of reasoning is the theory that those who come to our country do so for a free ride or to rob the ‘haves’. Of course there are those people. Heck, we have those people now and they are neither immigrants nor can they be categorized by race or former nationality. With all the good that trickles through the borders there will be the bad. However, with that bad comes a set of hard working and determined people who strive for nothing less than the American dream which so many of us here have either falsely achieved or abandoned in favor of easier goals, like being home in time to watch The Real Housewives of Orange County.

When thinking about immigrant perceptions I am constantly reminded of the divide between college and pro sports. Fans remind me that college athletes work harder, because they’re the have nots. They are the ones who are fighting for the chance to earn the professional roster spot and the big pay day. In this scenario we Americans are the pro  athletes who, fat on our big pay day, don’t play with the love and drive of the college athlete.

One guess to who the college athlete is in this scenario.