Day: June 3, 2013

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.