Month: June 2013

Perhaps it is fitting that I sit here in NYC back at the 210 lb mark. After all, it was here in NYC 20 yrs past that I sat at 165 with hopes of being a muscular 200 lbs. I over shot the mark by 10 lbs, none of which are muscle. This feels like a metaphor for my life which has brought upon me a weightiness I did not expect through travels and events I could never have imagined. Yesterday I met up with many of my closest friends from high school. While there were eight notable absences from that inner-cadre, the ones who made the journey 29 yrs in the making helped me to remember the lessons that catapulted me into the world in the first place.

This is the first time in a decade I’ve gone somewhere and not dragged along work with me. I brought the bones of a novel on my honeymoon. Needless to say I was the guy who never quit. After a decade, the constant need to work eroded the quality of that work and of my mind itself. I lost my way and my will and my nerve to be creative. My quality of work and life degraded as responsibilities piled up and for a very long time I believed my best work was behind me. It took a reunion and a look at some old writing to remember the blueprint of what was and what is.

My point is this: It is normal and even expected to get beat down by life. As we go on we forget what can be and drown in what is. Find time to remember who you mean to be.

I’ve always found it strange that so many New Yorkers call Phoenix home. Sure, they’re both cities, but the title appeared to be where the similarities ended. Sitting above 24th street in New York on an abandoned railroad turned park, I decided to give the connection a bit closer consideration.

For starters, the lifestyle between NYC and PHX could hardly be more different. PHX is a horizontal community more prone to urban sprawl than proper use of space. New York is vertical. There are almost no buildings on manhattan island shorter than three stories. Thanks to the clearly defined borders of the island, the real estate magnates were forced to build up. Building up is not part of the plan in Phoenix. In fact, building up is regulated by law. In most suburbs you are not allowed to crest two stories let alone three. Of course, this is a bit of an unfair comparison in of itself. Manhattan is incomparable to anywhere outside of London proper. Still, Manhattan is what people think of when they think of NYC. It is the home of the World Trade Center ruins, the Empire State Building, and the actual City in Sex in the City.

Phoenix is best known for Scottsdale, a town slightly east and north of Phoenix proper. Scottsdale is known for money and golf courses and the bloody wealthy and frivolous folk presumed to live there. This is no presumption, of course. While there are a fair number of regular folk who call the dale home, there are an equal number–if not more–of folk who require a kickstand for their noses. The same can be said of NYC and anywhere on the westside with a street number below 90.

In the end, I can find some thin similarities in some of the people who live in the city, but the places themselves are so different as to suggest no relationship whatsoever. So, I am left to wonder why people choose to move from one place to the other. Maybe it is the same reason I moved. Maybe everyone wants a really big house.

Some Thoughts:
1. In retrospect, $150 for a three hour reunion seems a bit overpriced. It may not be. We will find out in a few hours.
2. I really do miss NYC. I am a different person here. I am a better person here I think. I am more driven to accomplish things.

I’ve been playing mind games. Not the ‘mess with someone’ variety, but the sharpen your brain variety. Ipads are good for that. I’ve been playing a few like Room and Machinarium, but I am also playing the Hasbro classics Risk and Scrabble. I learned that my brain isn’t as sharp as it was at the ripe old age of 18, but I can still do the complex thinking if I do it in chunks. The key to living as a thinker is thinking. Our society is geared towards limiting our need and opportunity to think, so we as individuals are responsible for taking up the weighty challenge of critical thought. By extending myself to think quite a bit more than I am required to I am undoing a lot of damage and remembering what it feels like to be an intelligent human being.

Don’t get me wrong, what I do as an educator requires intelligence, but what i do daily becomes a pattern and familiar patterns fail to expand and ignite the brain. The key to knowledge is new; expanding the parameters of what your mind is expected to do every day.

Some Thoughts:

1. I struggle to imagine how vast and desolate an abandoned city like Chernobyl must be. Moreover, I am left to wonder how many other abandoned cities we don’t know about.

I’m writing this post from the back of a US Airways Airbus on the aisle side of two of my kids who can’t remember the last time they’ve been on a flight. This has been the most stressful day of my life. I am not sure if it is the impending class reunion, the stress of bored kids in summer, or the heavy knowledge that I still have much work to be done before the month is through.

My 20th class reunion is on saturday with a tour of the school on friday. This little jaunt down memory lane promises to ignite some memories of the past. I dot remember terribly much about High School (further proof of the suckiness that is impending Alzheimers) nor have I located any photographic evidence outside of 1 photo that proves I ever attended high school or even lived in NYC for that 18 yr stretch. I am a digital ghost from 75 – 93. I suppose most of that is my fault for not wanting to be in pictures and not having the confidence that the camera could stand my face. I do remember one small bit of H.S. I remember cheating on my girlfriend with Anna Maria Stanomir (sorry for the public bust out). I even remember why: My girlfriend publicly revealed she’d been writing love poems to some dude she hooked up with out of country pre-us. Man that ticked me off. One or both of those ladies will be there, but that isn’t what worries me. Not remembering people and having nothing to talk with people about is what worries me. I get the concept of class reunions, but what I don’t get are the expectations. What do we all still have in common after 20 yrs? Those of us who remained connected don’t really need a reunion to connect and those of us who haven’t may not understand how to navigate our way back towards anything resembling the friendships that locked us together for 4 meaningful years in the late 80’s to early 90’s.

My kids are coming up in the 10’s and may not make it to high school if they continue the cooped up bickering and screaming that defined last summer and is beginning to define this summer. At 109 degrees in AZ, we are bound to feel a bit cooped, but add in the conflict of Minecraft where all they want to do is digitally play out the ‘who has more stuff’ game and it promises to be a long and stress-filled summer.

Adding to that stress is the knowledge that there is work to be done and no real schedule to complete that work. I think I don’t want to think about that at least until this weekend vacation is over. Then when I get back from the city I can give my attention to my job and develop a workable schedule to get the tasks done. At least I want to get working hard. That is a change from a few weeks ago.

Some Thoughts:
1. I get wanting an iPad you can slip away easily, but I don’t get the heavy price tag for the iPad mini.
2. Speaking of heavy price tags, US Air charges you for everything. A blanket costs money, food costs money, and they spend the first 20 minutes of the flight trying to get you to invest in a credit card.
3. The (2?) year old girl across from me has dragged her mom to the bathroom three times and we took off a half hour ago. At this rate mom is going to run out of diapers or smack her kid. I’m betting on the smack.
4. Was able to catch the end of the Heat-Spurs game at the airport. The Spurs continue to look impressive. I still say MIA in 7.
The problem with a daily blog is that sometimes you have a lot to say and sometimes you dont.

Sex sells. Apparently, it is the only thing that sells in mainstream media. In order to pitch a product you must be good looking. If you are a female you also need to look like you work out 17 hrs a day with occasional breaks for wild sexual activity that might be available on the internet. This is a fact of life as much as consumerism is a fact of life. The question is why?

When I first tackled the question I figured this phenomenon was a function of our biological imperative. As a species our primary function is to reproduce. We exist to breed and to breed with the best of our species, so the sales process in a way mirrors this search for biological continuance. However, there is a second theory for the prominence of sex in sales.

I believe that sexual interaction is often more about power than biological continuance or survival. We buy items in order to prove our power to others or to ourselves. The purpose of a Maserati is not to have a reliable car, but to have a reliable car that people look at and say, ‘wow, look what that person has’. In terms of sex, having sex or having access to sexual partners who are generally accepted as being attractive is a way of gaining that ‘wow, look’ response we all subconsciously laud.

We laud people more than things. Having people who other people want is more important than having stuff. Now here is the purchase power connection: If a beautiful person is linked to a product, it raises the profile and value of the product because the consumer subconsciously believes possessing the product in some way links them to the valued person.

Give the desk lady at the Ultra Star Cinema in Maricopa sixteen bucks and she’ll lead you back to theater #2 where there are several rows of special ‘D’ class seats. The seats are part of the D-box experience, a rumbling, shifting, shaking add-on that syncs to the action of the film. For my first D-box experience there was only one choice: Fast 6. By the time the film was over my mind was heavy with the films recurring message and my lips were curled with anticipation of the next chapter.

Fast 6 revisits the beginning of the Fast and Furious saga, reviving star Dominic Toretto’s (Vin Diesel) girlfriend, Leddy (Michelle Rodriguez) as a villain and part of an all-world mobile theft team. In order to get her back Toretto’s own crew teams up with the international cop (Duane ‘The Rock’ Johnson) who hunted them down last film.

Believe it or not, Fast 6 is a moral tale. The series is all about family and honor and code, much in the vein of Samurai movies. These Bushido operate to keep each other alive and to maintain that sense of strength and honor. They also work to make up for their mistakes. In that sense, Toretto and crew are classic heroes on Campbell’s eponymous journey. I wouldn’t mistake this tale for high art, but the main themes ring loud and true. Who goes to these movies for themes anyway? Fast is about cars, girls, and crashes and it delivers that at a pace unmatched by any of the previous films.

Fast 6 is pure action. It starts and ends with car chase scenes and throws in several hero vs. villain fights along the way. What worked best was the chemistry between Johnson (referred to as Samoan Thor) and Diesel. Both of these superstars can carry a film and watching them play off each other as equals and even reluctant friends felt entirely genuine.

I like films that build a world that makes sense. I don’t expect that world to be my world, and Fast 6 isn’t any realistic world whatsoever. It doesn’t matter to me as a viewer. So long as the world stays within the rules of the world, I’ll play along. I played along for 6 and was rewarded with an incredible post credits ending I never saw coming. That ending tells me I”ll play along for 7.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m thinking about framing in a bookshelf to the makeshift ‘tree house’ I built for the kids last year. I want it to be a team project where the kids take a major role in the design. The goal is to see that space completed in a way that is cool and the kids can get behind. Now the ‘do it now’ guy in me wants to knock this out tomorrow, but I think significant planning from the beginning of this thing–blueprinting–all the way to completed construction will be more beneficial to the boys.

A long time ago (back in the first 200 blogs I believe) I mentioned that it is so much easier to destroy than to create. The same axiom holds true for consuming vs. creating. I spent the past week creating this wonderful Minecraft experience for my kids and they’re going to complete it in mere hours. As a writer I know this time deflation all too well. I take weeks or even months to create a thrilling novella and the average reader knocks it out in about the time it takes to clear a poop. While being able to distract and perhaps even educate someone for that long is quite rewarding, I do wish the time of consumption reflected the time of creation in a less fractional sense.

Realizing this conundrum has no real solution, I recognize it is infinitely important for me to enjoy the creation process as much if not more than the pleasure of knowing someone enjoyed your work. This idea of process is what I try to communicate most as a teacher, but I worry that process doesn’t matter to people nearly as much as I felt it did to people when I was a student. Sure, there was apathy then too, but process had purpose. Now purpose appears to be the reward, or in the corporate sense, the profit margin. Call it a sad side effect of capitalism.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Maybe it is a sign of early onset Alzheimer’s, but I am at the point where big words just spring to mind to fit a situation without me really understanding what those words means other than knowing that they fit the situation. 

1. Once you’ve embraced any technology to the point where it is second nature to use that tech, you cease to understand how to function without that tech. We lived for a very long time before the wheel came along. Now we don’t know what we’d do without it or cellphones.
2. The Miami Heat should win the game tomorrow night. Should they lose, you can simply hand the trophy over to the Spurs. Of course, the Spurs are a very deserving team in their own right, so I wouldn’t be so sad about that. In fact it could trigger an 80 win season for team Lebron.
3. Online classes go so much better when you give students your full attention. I’ve been doing that this summer and the attentiveness is reflected in better student work. I also think they care more because they know someone is watching. On the other hand, attentiveness drives off the students who signed up for the online class to cash in a loan check and kickback. That isn’t so bad either.
4. My Ipod touch is practically bricked. Any Apple handheld device two generations behind the curve is unusable. This is how they keep up sales.
5. Money feels different when you’re older. When I was a kid $100 meant a universe of possibility. I thought I could never see that much cash in my hands. As a teen the magic number stretched to $200. Now I spend that on groceries and weekend hangouts with the kids.
6. Speaking of stretched, Roy Hibbert (Indiana Pacers) got himself in trouble for being ignorant. He indicated that he was being stretched out on D by the Heat and added the disclaimer, ‘No homo’ in order to remind folks of his sexual orientation. The immaturity cost him $75,000. To begin, that outpaces my teacher salary. Hibbert however made better than 13 million this season, so the fine was chump change to him. Perhaps the fine money should go to me, so I can help educate people about the social conditions that made him say what he said…
7. Speaking of social conditions, I am obsessed with Bar Rescue. The economic science the show employs to express how and why a bar is failing blows me away. It seems simple on the surface, but the depth of the research is absolutely intriguing. I think if I stop teaching I want to open a bar.
8. I think I need to strengthen my hands considerably. The number of joint and finger injuries I’ve endured over the last year is staggering. I skipped FB this morning because I didn’t want to risk injuring a bad joint further.
9. I think first drafts make terrible first impressions of a writer’s true skill, which doesn’t bode well for this blog. This is a constant first draft and a daily struggle to find both the motivation and the topic to continue. Of course with 1,120 straight days under my belt I see no need or impulse to stop.
10. I think that about covers it for the night.

 

1. My mac power supplies have been failing. The main mac is presently in the red with 31 minutes of service left. I cannot find a clear reason for the failures. I know that I started with three and now I am down to one.

2. The last episode of Orphan Black rolled by tonight and I am watching the replay as I type. Over the last week I’ve been bouncing between mainstream shows about cloning and time travel. Both concepts were once cutting edge sci fi and now they are commonplace. So, what is the next big concept?

I’m still digging into new TV shows. It becomes more hobby than obsession over the summer when I am trying to escape from kid fights. In those moments when I slip into my dusty bedroom and flip on the tube I want to see something that utterly removes me from my world and thrusts me violently into situations and problems I feel intrigued to be watching. Lately I’ve been watching Continuum. The Simon Barry-created police procedural stars Rachel Nichols and Lexa Doig. The latter actress is a sci-fi staple and perfectly cast as the main villain. The story intrigues and the science raises very interesting questions like, what happens if you change the past?

I’ve seen a lot of time travel tropes, key among them being the ‘if my parents die then I am toast’ trope. Nichols character, Kiera Cameron starts the series off by quipping on that old trope. In a matter of episodes we know (or we think we know) if she is right or wrong. I think that is the best part of the show for me. It seeks to challenge these tropes and show what happens when you mess with the past. Now this show is not Defiance, but it is holds your attention for a couple of episodes, which is sensible because every major plot point takes three or more episodes to fully develop. Given its isolated episodic nature (unlike say a Babylon 5), you can drop the show for a few episodes and pick it up when it gets good again without missing the key developments.

I’m going to record Continuum for the new season. I’m hoping it still has the potential to surprise me.