Month: September 2013

I remain grateful for the opportunity to teach and to interact with students. The energy and excitement and raw potential they bring is pretty inviting to an old vampire like me. This is my 1 on 1 week where I get to sit down with all of the students in two separate courses and learn a bit about them and their needs. I think the greatest thing a person can do in life is to inspire others, so I work very hard to be the guy that gets others going.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m not one for keeping up with the Joneses, but when I see something I really like in a home, I want that. I spent some time at the neighbor’s house and found myself saying ‘I want that’ a lot. Maybe part of going back to work is having a desire to improve your position or environment.
2. Time for a haircut.
3. The Eagles are the real deal. They basically run the kind of offense you run for little kids with the awareness that kids never get tired.

The signs of burnout can be physical as well as mental. I don’t know that I showed too many signs, but the burnout was both obvious and overwhelming to me. Even in the throws of my best writing opportunities in years, I was torn between feeling utterly spent and trying to give my all to the stories. The moment the writing ended my creativity lapsed into a coma. Now, as I write this post, I can feel the edges of the coma thawing like fingers slowly finding movement and coming back to life.

I needed a rest. I needed a sense of understanding of how I got here and how to prevent myself from getting here again. My physical analysis shows that I sleep roughly 65% of the 8 hrs I need to sleep in order to effectively refresh my body. I don’t move as much either, usually completing less than 8,000 steps per day on days I don’t coach. I move more when I coach, which is relative to the sport I am coaching and my coaching role (head coach, asst., trainer). There is a clear connection between physical activity and brain function, and that correlation grows stronger when applied to direct learning exercises and neuroplasticity.

Now I’m in a space where I can see a solution. Move, think, and be yourself. That means I have to allow myself to enjoy who I am (faults and all) in order to remove the stress of trying to be someone I’m not. That, and overworking, led to burnout and sucked my creativity dry.

Here’s to getting it back.

One of the main reasons I love writing Shadowrun is the opportunity to draw pleasure out of everyday corporate life. Growing up in the steel and glass canyons of NYC I was exposed to a lot of the corporate life. Right designer, right school, right car, daily protocols. I suppose I’m channeling my inner Joseph Finder when I sit down and think about these things. I wonder how distribution networks really come together and stay together. I wonder about the middle men and how people manage to make a profit on the margins. That is the stuff I love writing about, because there is so much mystery there. Nobody knows what really goes on, which gives me plenty of space to make it up and to make it far more interesting than it probably could be otherwise.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watching Zero Dark Thirty, written by fellow Bronx Science alum and Writing Club member Mark Boal, I found myself thinking really hard about torture and what defines torture and what would be ‘enough’ for me to want to condone that. I think it is easier to have done than to be intimately involved in the process. That physical separation makes the psychological separation much simpler.
2. Rough soccer day. I’m realizing my 8-9 team is going to be terrible without all of the lynchpin guys. We have 2 on defense, a rover, and 2 strikers that the team cannot function without. 1 defender messed up his foot and was ineffective after, one striker messed up his ankle and was on the bench, and the rover had a stomach flu. the 2 minutes that rover was in there you saw the energy level of the whole team pick up in response. He is the key. They need his energy to get them moving.

A Teacher, the new Hannah Fidell film opening digitally and on the big screen today, explores the erotic and psychologically demanding relationship between a High School teacher and the student she is sleeping with. I cannot help but think this film would have been dead in production had the genders of the teacher and student been reversed. Not since Lolita has this sort of dark territory been properly addressed, and even then the gender descriptions played a huge role in the interpretation of the relationship. I wonder if films like this aren’t working to maintain the dominant stereotype of woman as nymphet and man as hapless victim?

Lolita is now internationally known as a term for a hyper-sexual young woman. How it got there has more to do with the film than the book. In Kubrick’s well-recieved adaptation, the  14 year old girl is generally seen as a sex object and portrayed at times as wanting to maintain that image. Therefore the struggle becomes for the man to somehow resist what are more modernly portrayed as his acceptable urges to be with this woman. This old refrain is common today. I recently shared an Axe commercial with one of my classes. In the commercial the ‘announcer’ takes on the role of a lecturer as he explains that women are getting ‘hotter’ and that threatens all men. We tend to internalize such things, sparking debates such as ‘what does she think is going to happen when she dresses like that?’ As if my gender is so weak that we’ll take a woman’s attire as an implicit request for sexual advances. In fact, many men do just that, and this is what troubles me about the new film A Teacher. 

I haven’t seen the film, so I will only speak to the way it is being advertised. Everything about this film suggests a certain neediness and desire to ‘take’ the high school boy. At the same time, the only suggestion of wrong doing comes from snippets of her worry of getting caught. Moreover, she seems more concerned about the boy’s interest in other women and the boy acting like a boy by posting pictures of her than she does about the fact that what she is doing undermines long standing social mores.

Or does it?

Maybe what I’m bothered by is the implicit perception here that it is more okay for a female teacher to engage a high school student than it is for a male student to do the same. When we see this in the media, the idea of who is taking advantage of who shifts, because of the strange duality of who we call victim and when we call them victims. Or maybe I’m bothered that this portrayal won’t advance the conversation at all but instead will confuse the matter and make us second guess who is to blame the next time this sort of thing happens in our schools.

The best stuff I read is the stuff that comes out of left field–be it from perspective, relationships, context, or what have you. Looper, for example, caught me unawares because of the concept of having to murder your future self as the final act of your employment. I liked that in the way I like the guessing game that is Gone Girl, where you see two sides of a relationship gone horribly wrong or Room, which introduced me to a perspective I found unique and inviting. What all of these stories have in common is that they made the familiar unfamiliar in a way that made it interesting to engage with the story.

Lets be honest, every story has already been told. Your job as a writer is to find the human interest story within that an tell it from a different angle. Create a scenario–any scenario–and use that scenario to look at character interaction from an angle you haven’t seen before. That is how you stay creative.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Shout out to Kevin Hearne for agreeing to sit with my creative writing students for a period. The voice of experience and success is often heard more clearly.

I’m a bit rusty at this, so be gentle. Well, the truth is the Wednesday posts are the least read posts of the week/year/ever, so the only critic I need to worry about when it comes to football pics is myself. It is a shame nobody listens, though. See, I’m pretty damn good at this. Once I recognized that my athletic days were long behind me (though I still feel the need to make excuses for not showing up to the Sunday morning pickup game), I made an effort to learn all I could about the game and be good in terms of analysis. Last year that meant I beat all but 3 of the ESPN pros. This year I actually know what I’m doing.

So, its on. Here it goes:

Denver over Baltimore
Ray Rice is going to run wild and give me a heap of fantasy points. Unfortunately, the lack of a serious Raven secondary and presence of a hungry team of wideouts means Manning will be able to bounce back quick. Look for the second half to turn ugly.

New England over Buffalo
There is a lot of talk about the changes on the Baltimore defense. Remember, the guy they went with has a history of doing good things against Patriots offenses. Unfortunately, the Patriots have more talent and have a scheme they know better than the scheme Buffalo does not know. It will be closer than we could imagine on the surface, but Brady is still going to be Brady.

Seattle over Carolina
Upset alert! I want to believe that Carolina can show the fans something at home in this nascent 2013-14 season. I just don’t believe they have accumulated enough talent to do so against a defense that could very well be a top 5 this year. Get your Skittles ready.

Cincinnati over Chicago
Call this one the HBO bump. I wasn’t terribly interested in the Hard Knocks show this season, but I am aware of how much better the Bengals play when under the spotlight. Oh, and James Harrison is over there now. There’s that.

Miami over Cleveland
2013’s answer to the Sacko Bowl comes early this year. CLE was excellent in the preseason, and Miami was not. Still, the preseason is about developing a depth chart and where depth matters (at the top of the chart) CLE is still rather thin. Their running game should keep it close, but not close enough.

Oakland over Indy
Spoiler alert: Pryor is legit as a scrambling QB. He won’t shock the world this year or even perform at a Vick level, but he will do enough in the early going to give Raider fans hope. Hope that will be snatched away in week 2.

KC over JAC

NO over ATL

TB over NYJ
All three of those games aren’t even in contention. People will readily assume ATL is a good matchup, but it is week 1 and they are not 100%. KC is still healthy (wait for it), and my beloved Jets stink worse than a skunk in decomp.

Pit over TEN

SF over GB
Nnamdi has a lot to prove here, and he will get his chance against this 3 wide set where he will likely draw the job of covering Nelson or Cobb in the slot. As he goes so does the game, because CK isn’t turning into Superman in week 1.

Arizona over St Louis
Toughest pick of the night. STL did very well against division rivals last season–at least in comparison to the rest of their record. I believe in AZ early. I have no reason to believe in AZ past week 5.

NYG over DAL
No-brainer. Eli signed his name on the wall in the guest locker room on opening night. Giants have owned the stadium ever since.

PHI over WAS
Incredibly interesting battle of old philosophy vs. new and the eventual passing of the torch from dad the coach to son the coach. There is going to be a ton of offense here.

Hou over SD
Who Cares? Bowl 2013. Seriously. Does anyone believe either of these teams are contenders past the 1st round of the playoffs? HOU has the best defensive player in the sport, but their offense sputters and coughs like a 89 yr old smoker on a ventilator. Their #1 receiver is roughly that old in football years. Their #1 RB will dress, might play, might not. Ben Tate is more than a serviceable backup, and if I were coaching I would play Tate and rest Foster for a few more weeks. I would also have found a legit #2 wideout through trades or maybe the draft, but that is just me.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Finally started Gone Girl. I’m impressed with the female reader as much as I am with the flow of the writing for that character. It is the creepy male protag that has me unsure. The casting of Affleck as the lead in the movie version only confirms the creep factor.

I haven’t written a story in over two months and that troubles me. I knew–I know–August-September represents the nexus of all things extremely demanding and difficult in my life, so I half-believe I deserve a pass, but the non-believing half says a real writer fights through all life has to throw at him and still finds the time to take that fight and turn it into fiction.

I am not without ideas or motivation, but during this yearly downturn the needs of the world outweigh the means of the writer, and I find myself slipping into the fantasy reality of video game football, fantasy football, and quite a bit of youth futbol (which starts this saturday). Writing? I can make at least 10 minutes for that. Any more is way more difficult.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Erin Burnett has a glow. I remember that glow from my wife’s 3 pregnancies. Happy times there. I wonder how she is going to balance those first six months and the job? I hope she allows herself some time off to do what needs be done and then comes back super-charged. After all, she is one of the few newscasters who I feel is a straight shooter.
2. First day in a while I haven’t played the new Madden. I would play if I wasn’t so certain my wife would wake up.

Following Nolan’s completion of the Dark Knight trilogy and Derf Beckderf’s release of his Graphic Novel, My Friend Dahmer, I began nursing a theory about the relationship between these two dark forces. Dahmer, a real-life monster and Batman, a fictional vigilante, are more closely linked than one might imagine. Both are products of their environment and social traumas. I would argue that Batman’s evolving unwillingness to take life is the only thing that separates the two men.

Jeff Dahmer was raised in troubled household. His mother and father separated after which his mother spiraled into bouts of depression and other maladies. Her troubles contributed to her unawareness of his own troubles, which included closeted homosexuality and a proclivity for dead things. This, on the surface, seems to differ dramatically from the image of the Batman, but when you look closer things click into place.

After his arrest Dahmer was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), an affliction he shares with the caped crusader. Dahmer pointed to his traumatic upbringing and lack of supervision as a key enabling factor for his crimes. The same can be said of Bruce Wayne who–for reasons that seem to have never been explained–was left to the care of his butler. While in the care of his butler (who held the precarious role of raising the person who had the power to fire him. Explain what sort of discipline could happen there) Wayne developed a curiosity about crime that was only sated by donning a cape and cowl and stamping out crime all together.

The early Batman was a murderer. He carried a gun and killed bad guys at will. He was Dexter Morgan, living comfortably behind the white sheet of his code and believing that he was doing right because the people that fell to him were doing wrong. As the makers of Batman evolved so did the character. He moved away from killing and developed into the nuanced character that we know and love today. He, unlike Dahmer, became a person who recognized a limitation. Dahmer wanted to posses people. He wanted to be linked to them in such a deep and permanent way that he truly believed that ingesting their flesh made them one with him and, perhaps, honored them in a way. Batman wanted nothing of the flesh but everything of the mind. He wanted people to fear him as they would darkness itself. He beat and abused those he encountered so savagely that his work left an impression on all that witnessed it. He didn’t eat their flesh, he ate their souls.

It sounds thin here, but what doesn’t in 10 minutes of unscripted blathering. Maybe I’ll pen a real essay on this down the road.