Day: August 5, 2013

I said sometime last year (or before) that if you do something long enough you become known for it. I have been an average to below average teacher for about four years now. I feel like the teaching version of A-Rod: getting a good paycheck and sucking. It is worse when I visit other teachers and watch how they explode into the classroom with such a wealth of knowledge and determination that I practically feel inadequate sharing space with them. I suppose the same applies to some of my writing. I recently finished working on an anthology with some top shelf authors and I feel like my writing, though decent, wasn’t the best in the book. It should’ve been. Everything we do as individuals should be better than the last thing we did, because once we peak it is only downhill from there.

Diagnosing the problem is tough, but I can look to a series of factors that I’ve gone over ad nauseum on this blog. Kids, Time (see kids), Motivation. Like the good Bob says, “Accept the things you cannot change and have the courage to change the things you can.” I’ve worked out a lot about time management through this blog, spending almost a year of writing dancing around that issue. Now motivation can be summed up more easily: You need to find it in yourself to want to make the effort to be the best and turn on that switch that says ‘One Step Further’. We all have the switch, though it is usually buried deep within that hoarders lair we call a mindscape. I can see it within me, sometimes just out of reach. The key is putting the effort into self efficacy so that you can navigate the crowded caverns of your own psyche to find and finally flip that dang switch.

I’m still working on it, I suppose. But I am getting closer.

Some Thoughts:

1. I joined the modding culture of Xbox 360, albeit briefly. I wanted to create a mod guy that would allow me to level up other players, thus skipping the tough “learn to play and earn your stripes” grind that I should be teaching my kids, but am not. There is a balance of sorts there. I modded up to the point where the other characters I legitimately earned up are, so we have the opportunity to switch characters and I can play that fill-in role where needed. In other words, I am making poor excuses for being a cheater at video games. 

I believe in ghosts. There have been too many experiences in my life for me to remain a disbeliever. However, I cannot understand at this point why anyone would believe without seeing due to the absolutely terrible attempts at falsification of paranormal evidence. I’m not talking about the low-budget YouTube stuff. I’m talking about the financed and televised hoaxes peppering A&E and SyFy. The stuff coming out these days is terrible. It is so bad that I feel insulted as a viewer.

The A&E show that has me so disgusted is a poopfest called American Haunting. The show feels like a seven year old watched Paranormal Activity, showed it to her producer parents who said, “yeah, let’s go with that.” The show attempts to persuade you that the family of the episode is being haunted and cameras are stations around the house for 11 days to catch evidence. What you end up with is a terribly and amateurishly staged hoax that doesn’t even attempt to look real. This show may single handedly remove any few believers in the idea of the paranormal.

If you want to make a disbeliever feed them a steady diet of hoaxes to the point where they’ve been so moved to disbelief that a ghost must actually slap them in the face for them to believe a ghost is real.

As I write this I am coming down from a 24 hr caffeine high. I was on the road for 12 hrs a day doing nothign but driving, scribbling notes, and listening to audio books–all of this in a caffeinated haze with no food. There were niblets, ofc rouse, but nothing thart would constitue a meal. Food isn’t the issue. This is a blog about the value of spednign time by yourself.

I spent the day on the road. 12+ hours of driving through the midwest trying to reach home. I left around 9 AM and finally pulled in for the night at 11 at a Motel 6 that, even by the standards of the workers, was ridiculously crowded. My first job was to settle in and relax. I flipped through HBO to Picasso Baby, Jay-Z’s strange attempt to merge rap with modern performance art. It felt pretentious–especially when he connected with a woman who I recognized as an actual performance artist. I later learned there were several artists and actors and art dealers and rappers and musicians in attendance who all seemed to feel that this moment he created had intense meaning. I suppose these learned individuals would be better judges than I in the general sense, but to ask me as an individual, this was cool and exciting, but it did not take rap to any higher level of art form–no matter if Wale and Fab 5 Freddy are there to bridge the history and culture of the medium or not.

I took off my Jawbone Up to take a shower and settled it into the charger. What I didn’t do was take it with me when I left for the airport. Now a feel like a man who just left his kid at the mall. In what felt like a week the Up became an integral part of my daily routine. I came to rely on the on the familiar buzz of inactivity every 15 minutes I sat idle. I’d even grown to believe the buzz could be of service to me on this roadtrip, prodding me to stay awake as day passed into night and the hours of mid-America highway travel grew tedious. No such luck it seems. We grow to rely on these things we carry. As one author once wrote, they come to define us, creating meaning, symbolism, even separation in our lives.