Month: January 2016

The initial week of Spring classes is nearly over and I haven’t lost my mind yet. The same can be said of the first quarter of a 7 game flag football season. Now I recognize I’ve given a lot of attention to the coaching, but when there are three teams involved it gets a bit cumbersome. Add in 125 students and nightmares begin to take form.

Its the names that worry me. I’m not good with names to begin with. I tend to remember people in context. The kid with the too white hair and Knicks ball cap who said that one thing that one time, the girl with the pretty shoes. These people have names and, on occasion, I’ll remember them. however, en masse remembering 150 people I see at least twice a week (counting in the teams I coach) is a tall order.

All of this is really a symptom of something larger. No, not Alzheimer’s (I hope), but a lack of a system of organization for how I do things. Its become painfully obvious that I’m not at my best when scattered. How else does one lose keys on a mountain, lose keys in a classroom, lose his train of thought… (what was I talking about? oh!) constantly?

So, I’m working hard to not feel so Spent and develop better habits for dealing with this new life I’ve carved out for myself. Change is good and hard — about as hard as remembering 150 names every semester.

I was half-asleep, overwrought, and overworked when I wrote the Land of Broken Dreams post. That was only one shard of dozens of fractured ideas kicking around my head last night, and the only one that seemed to gain any footing on the page. Today I’m just going to let a few more loose and see what happens…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The Warriors blew out the Cavs ugly (34 pts) and the Spurs keep winning. I am starting to think that maybe the NBA isn’t altogether about star power. Sure, Steph Curry is lights out, but there are four other starters and a host of bench players putting in work to make them near invincible. And the Spurs? Three of their top four players are monitoring minutes to be rested and ready for the playoffs and the team is still winning almost every game. At what point do we acknowledge that Popovich is in that same rare air as Belicheck and Madden? The man has been coaching the Spurs since 1996 for pete’s sake.
2. Part of being back on track with my writing is realizing what it takes to get back on and, eventually swerve off track. It all comes down to pace and pressure. When you spend so much time rushing to meet a deadline it takes a lot out of you. How then can you expect yourself to continue that intensity daily while dealing with, well, life? I really can’t say that this is reasonable. What I need to learn (and eventually write about) is how to strike balance as a writer and organize oneself in a fashion that allows you to do a little bit every day, setting reasonable goals all the way up to the deadline.
3. Finally physically let go of my anger in regards to my kids’ football season. I had to sit with it a bit longer to really experience it and understand what it was about. The whole thing really boiled down to broken promises, failed expectations, and my own failures as a parent by being sucked in by a truly charismatic leader. The boys’ coach is truly charismatic and is a very skilled coach–especially at the high school level where it is purely about winning. He selects talent and makes that talent so much more confident and straight up better. Unfortunately, if you are part of the select list you are basically cast down and ignored. I had one son who was part of that good group and one that was not. He pit them against each other and that was hard for me as a parent. I allowed myself to be drawn in by promises of what would be and virtually nothing promised was realized. We won the championship, but given the talent level of the four team league, it would’ve been a shame not to win. What sucks is that I lost a year of valuable teaching for one of my sons. Moreover, he nearly lost his love for the game.
4. I’m excited about being back on track with a work schedule. Perhaps I’m more excited about the structure than the schedule and responsibilities themselves. All I keep thinking about is how much it will help me as a writer and a coach to have that level of structure.
5. Speaking of coaching, my 10-12 team lost their first game while my 8-9 won their first. My 6-7 continues to find wins somehow, despite a very raw and often confused set of players. Those two wins boil down to a couple of players really playing beyond the level of the league. I cannot say that of 8-9 or 10-12 where the problem is an inability to execute on offense. That’s on me. A good offense should create opportunity for the least skilled player to be successful and for those who have talent to excel. I’m still working on that part.

I’m terrified by college and I teach at one. I’m terrified by the responsibility I have to both inform students of what they are capable of and simultaneously make it clear to them what their limitations presently are. You see, so many incoming students enter college full of life but devoid of purpose and so many of those same students leave broken and uncertain about what possibilities await for them in the coming future.

This is something that is done intentionally by colleges across the globe. There is no malice intend in the act. What we do is expose students to reality, to hard work, and to experiences that are not necessarily designed neatly or with a clear answer at the end. This is new for them and generally difficult. It is so difficult in fact that almost 40% of students who start at any college don’t finish in six years.

Everyone wants to have that easy good life but few are interested in working as hard as they can in order to get there. So college is that point where they discover what it takes to get the life they desire and often decide not to have that life at all.

 

At a party with some friends the guys and I wound up talking about the odd stuff our kids say. We came around to the phrase, “Bye, Felicia.” which appeared most recently during a one of the better sequences in Straight Outta Compton. The kids have been saying it over and again, mostly out of context with, well, everything. We shared a laugh and talked about the scene and what it means and how they came around to even knowing about the phrase (thanks, Internet!)

It took me until I was out the door and in the car to actually remember that the line came from Friday and not from Straight Outta Compton. That’s the joke right there. Bye, Felicia is a kiss off line meant to disregard someone coldly and casually–someone who doesn’t know they don’t matter.

Here’s where it gets weird: All these kids saying it are below the age of 12 and have never ever seen friday and most haven’t seen straight out of Compton beyond a handful of clips on the inter webs.

So now the term exists wholly on its own as a social meme that has disconnected from its original generation and reconnected with a generation who have no idea of the historical relevance.

That makes me wonder how many memes have already moved through time and been separated from meaning and intent only to be co-opted by those who have the power to dictate language and trend…

Some Thoughts:

1. For all the talk about the Warriors amazing season and record, people are overlooking the fact that the Spurs are very quietly three games behind them. Lets not forget the Spurs have been this good since the days of David Robinson. That comes down to some amazing coaching–clearly a situation I have yet to achieve, but I at least realize what that means, finally.
2. It means making your players better, helping them learn to work together, and building sportsmanship and skill in tandem. I’m on it.
3. Something I hate: When people smile to your face but actually dislike you behind your back. I’m thinking about that at this moment, which means I am still living with anger I most recently tried to rid myself of.

I spent today being angry a lot. I wasn’t angry at my players. I was angry at myself and at a handful of coaches and parents. The tipping point was when a coach from my boys’ former team explained that they put my 68 lb son on the o-line and d-line so he would know what he’d be doing when he got older. My son is  a sprinter–a rail thin speedster who wants to run. He isn’t a lineman.

I don’t know why that hurt me so much but it did.

The fact remains it is so easy to get caught up in the anger and the ego and the mess of our own failures that we neglect to see that we are playing out these home movies on the screens of our children and they are learning from us. They are learning our pride, our wishes, our egos. And in teaching them our needs we all too often make these things a part of their DNA. We all too often, as a result of this, push them and put them in situations that are more about us than about them. We all too often find value in their victories as a reflection of our victories. They are not so.

The other day I was watching my kids run around the house playing games. The eldest would make up rules and use those things to his advantage. After a while the others caught on to the rules and started using them against him. This he did not appreciate and promptly changed the rules and the tone of the game to make it in his favor once more–even going so far as complaining and belittling the rules he once so loudly railed about in order to maintain an advantage.

I think you see where I’m gong here.

The modern political process is a high-priced kids game gone awry. Back during Obama’s first run we saw a great deal of yelling and screaming about how he wasn’t American because he was supposedly born in Kenya. Now nobody at this time (or ever after) bothered to mention that he would still be an American because his mother is an American citizen.

Fast-forward to the new ‘birther’ debate. Ted Cruz was born in Canada. This makes him Canadian. Now this fact on its own makes him ineligible as a candidate because he isn’t a natural born citizen, except all of a sudden everyone is talking about the fact that he has an American born parent, which automatically gives him dual citizenship and makes him an American.

Funny how this fact didn’t sway the anti-obama crowd but now we are supposed to not only know this but accept it so quickly that this issue shouldn’t even be tackled by the media.

There is a double standard–a growing double standard as those who have long been seen as the norm and the power group are losing power. We see those people flailing about and reaching out for any way to hold on, much like kids do when they sense things tipping. Things have already tipped.

I have really been struggling as a writer lately. The issue is not an unwillingness or lack of desire to write but instead the inability to conjure a significant schedule in the absence of a concrete work schedule. The problem could solve itself–I go back to teaching in a matter of days–but the problem could also be complicated by the additional work.

As deadlines loom close I wonder why it has come down to deadlines lately. I used to be able to churn out material long before the due date. Lately I beat a path up to the minute work is due. This is a problem that needs to be corrected.

I’ll be spending a lot of my thought processes in the coming months trying to figure it out…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Finishing up my reading list for Mythology 251 I discovered that I needed to add a last piece: Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. The way King weaves a wealth of myth and folktale in and out of his own mono myth is breathtaking.
2. I was thinking about the name Hitler the other day. I’ve never ever met anyone or heard about anyone with that last name. Think about that. The actions of one man destroyed an entire surname. I mean, even the Mussolini line continues on.
3. Ready for the semester–psychologically. That is the one part that matters. Good timing too. I need the money.
4. I think I’ll dress better this semester, because why the heck not.
5. Getting sick. Not a fan of that. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

I’ve heard and read a lot of people talk about the best way to develop the writer’s life. There are some basic commonalities between the talks:

1. You must write everyday
2. You must find a place where you feel comfortable writing
3. You must set aside a specific time to write
4. You must inform those in your life that this is writing time and don’t allow yourself to be interrupted.

There are more of course, but I am supremely concerned with number three for this post. I recognize that this specific one is a debatable point. A lot of great writers manage to write well without finding a set hour to do so. On the other hand, a lot of great writers do need a set time. Stephen King likes to get in his words before lunch. Others follow suit with the morning ritual and other still speak of the late evening and the witching hour as the best time to write.

I don’t have a specific time and I really don’t think time is the point at all. I think this is more about creating the habit of writing. The Ten Minute Rule is a habit of writing. I do this every day. When I began it used to be at a very specific time because that is what I needed to do in order to ensure that I would write at all. This is not because I don’t love writing. This was more a function of the fact that writing can be really hard to start/fall into especially if you have something you want to write well and are even the slightest bit nervous or concerned about completing; more still if you have nothing to say at all.

My best suggestion to writers is to indeed set a specific time. Not a lot at first. Set a manageable goal and allow that time to be sacred time, i.e. time that kids, work, etc. cannot infringe upon. To that end, I suggest the early morning. I’m writing this before the sun and the kids get up, because I know I’ll have the minutes where nobody is going to get in my way. It also is a way to start the day of right and with creativity. With that I say ‘Right on!’ and my ten minutes is about up.

Some Thoughts:

1. Ever notice how fake the political process has become? A dramaturgical analysis of the entire interplay might reveal that these people are acting not as if they are politicians, but as if they are caricatures of political characters played on TV. The synchronous standing and sitting and clapping based on party affiliation is stupid, devise, and rather juvenile. We get it, you’re part of the president’s gang or you are not. How is it you people don’t understand gang violence? I mean you live in in your gilded offices.

The officer was parked one house away from my own as I pulled up. I drove by, noticing him as I pulled into my own driveway. I knew him. Not a good sort of ‘know’ either. This was the man who’d pulled me over and basically read me the riot act (hand on sidearm) for changing lanes too close to the vehicle in front of me. Now it was my turn to approach him. See, he wasn’t the first officer I’d seen on my block recently. They’ve been on the block a lot lately–every week there is a cop sitting by. A lot of it stems from some domestic issues across from my home but the rest is pure mystery. I decided it was time to unravel the mystery.

I walked up to the officer, approaching him from the front, hands open and palms upturned. The irony of possibly being shot by a black cop for no reason whatsoever was not lost on me. He didn’t react at all to my approach, choosing to ignore me and continue the paperwork her was diligently scribbling out. I said hello and asked him what was going on. He blew me off. I asked him if there was an issue in the neighborhood and he finally said that he was writing a parking ticket and if there was an issue he’d evacuate the neighborhood.

That sat in my heart for days until I listned to a Ted talk from Melvin Russell, a former Baltimore police officer. Russell believes police have really stopped being a part of the community and become occupiers in the community. They’ve focused on the protect and forgotten the serve part of the oath. He doesn’t think it is all on the cops. He says, “we have surrendered so much of our responsibility to the police” that it creates that occupier mentality.

I feel like this is a real thing, and is a problem on both sides of the blue wall. The idea that an officer would evacuate my area is better suited for wartime Iraq than small town Maricopa. Yet, here we are.

The only question left is what do we want to do about it?

I have an overwhelming desire to stay up all night and grind through my latest project and finish planning and building all of my classes for the coming semester (hello, next Tuesday). However, my body is not interested. It feels like Bizarro World R.Kelly “My minds telling me yes, but my body, my body is telling me no!”

Tomorrow I really get back to the work of my life. Vacation time is officially over, and a writer’s gotta write and a teacher’s gotta teach, and a coach has gotta coach. As for the last part of that bit, I have a great deal of work to do with my teams. 6-7 is in need of a lot of teaching. 8-9 needs a starting qb, so I must now create one from whole cloth, and 10-12 has to practice clean routes and spacing.

Some Thoughts:

1. I just finished watching the national championship and watched a tight end own the day. On the Clemson end, this QB is legit and his wide receivers are something special. Y’know who isn’t that special? The Heisman Trophy winner. He has been wack throughout the entire playoff process. Regardless, the Tide rolled.
2. How great would it be to see Iowa State have a legit program again. The Big 12 isn’t what it was…
3. Meanwhile, Scott Van Pelt just talked smack about the entire bowl season, stating honestly that nobody watched and most of the games sucked. I mean, honesty isn’t smack talk but dang, man.