Month: May 2016

There are some people in life who make you want to sing out loud. There are some people in life who make you wish you could stab yourself in the brain repeatedly. I am blessed to have encountered both extremes in my life as it creates an understanding of what I need in order to be happy, healthy, and wise.

Or what I don’t need.

I’ll avoid specifics to protect the innocent and the guilty, but it goes like this: I’m stressed. I don’t have a lot of good people in my life and I continue to face what Flight Officer Ferro referred to as “Chop” in developing those relationships in a healthy way. I’m plum not good at it. From what I’ve been told (and is mostly true) I trend towards unhealthy relationships–specifically with the fairer gender. Of course, I’ve been doing it for most of my adult life so its invisible to me and, if i’m being honest, a part of my personality to do so. This stems from having a specific set of emotional needs and failing to have them met in any way shape or form for the majority of my adult life.

These are common needs–nothing that would earn me a trip to the dungeon or psychiatrist. Basic stuff like respect, dedication, even the idea of being first and foremost in someone’s mind. All of these things I want and have wanted from people since birth. Rarely have the ones who are supposed to offer such things provided them. Instead I quilted these emotional responses together from the relationships in my life forming a protective cover of relationships that weren’t always healthy, effective, or helpful outside of filling a niche need.

I don’t need that anymore, though I still wish I could have gotten the necessary emotional capital from where it should’ve come. What I need now is… well, I haven’t figured that out yet.

The average research scientist pulls in around 76K a year, which is equivalent to what a professor makes and still far below the 4 million average salary you get for playing baseball. I’m not talking about football or any of the other sports where CTE is known to be or have been an issue. I’m talking about boring old baseball. Granted its the national past time, but it isn’t even an olympic sport at this juncture. Meanwhile, real estate agents pulled in a median of 40K with a modicum of the talent and education required for any of the other two jobs. I suppose my point is this:  All of this talk about what jobs people should train for and making your kid into this or that is ridiculous. The jobs we direct them towards are merely shades of what we were directed towards and or what we feel is worthwhile and profitable.

But there are a lot of profitable professions.

I chose the path of teaching because I get a lot of of it. I adore the interaction between myself and students at all ages. I love watching new talent grow, go on to be productive, and hopefully return to show students that there is a path to their own success. We spend so much of our lives working that it feels ludicrous to even consider working a job you don’t enjoy. I get that we all have to do things we want to at some point in life, but your job is a major facet of your life. Living with and hating it is just as bad as being in a destructive relationship.

I don’t always love my job, but I’m as much of a fan of it as anyone can be. And at least we aren’t trying to kill each other.

As the school year spins to a close I find myself looking backwards with one eye and forward with another, anxious to assess what has come to past and figure out a plan moving forward. Life is change and assessment. We can only get better by recognizing who and what we have been and trying to become better versions of ourselves and placing that better self in the most advantageous situation. I speak jargonese here, but the key point is that I can only get bette by seeing exactly where I am at, what got me here, and deciding how to best proceed forward.

So, I’m at a place where I want to be a better partner, parent, writer, teacher, and I want to do these things from a place of financial stability. Honestly, I give myself a C grade for all listed save for financials which I mark as a low F. The blog has been a strong indicator of the other grades as of late, but the financials is something more about trying to live far outside of my means and recognizing that it doesn’t work.

Being a better partner is about being available for your loved one and putting them first. That is a tough one for me, because I spent a lot of time putting everyone else’s needs ahead of my own and it hurt me as a writer, teacher, and even a parent. Still, there has to be a way to merge these things Voltron-like as opposed to compartmentalizing and ultimately not applying time to the things that need it when they need it.

Part of these revelations emerge from having more time on my hands. I’m coaching less, which means less mental energy devoted to that pursuit. Now, I recognize that I am more effective when I coach less, but I also recognize how much I enjoy coaching and how much a part of my life that is. So, I’m going to restrict myself to one sport at a time moving forward and no more than two teams close enough in age that I can combine a fair number of the practices in order to limit how much time I spend coaching. If I have my kids three weeknights, I shouldn’t really spend more than two on coaching.

So thats a bit on partnership, parenting, and finance. With these ten minutes behind me, I’ll marinate on the rest.

Apparently I am a stress eater. This would explain why I’ve gone very very far over my daily intake. My buddy who went through this process (to the tune of 10.9% body fat) says a cheat day is a needed step. Well, I’ve been cheating like a maniac today, because of a game gone horribly wrong and three boys acting out for no reason in particular.

Today was the AYSL Spring championship and our undefeated 8u squad got knocked down a peg with a 28-18 loss to ThurmU. Respect to ThurmU but we lost based on an inability to play ‘next man up’. One of our captains and this season’s MVP severely sprained his ankle on the first drive. He is also one of our linebackers, part of a very good and very thin corps that wasn’t able to make up the loss entirely. Our O-line also struggled and a string of bad snaps sealed the loss.

Afterwards we went to the Civil War movie and my boys did in fact act a fool. From snatching things out of my hand to yanking each other out of chairs to general boisterousness, the gang was in rare form. It did not mess up my viewing of the movie but the previews were affected to the point where I almost said screw it and took them home.

Now fatigue takes me and I take my leave until the morrow.

Another late night with nothing to say. There has to be some kind of change in order to get to this moment of relax and reflection before I’m all burnt out. So far, nothing. Today’s challenge was learning and teaching the obscenely complicated Yu-gi-oh! card game.

Wow.

That was nearly ten minutes. An all-time low. lets all agree to forget this ever happened.

Ever.

I’m trying to slot a copy of Deadpool before I go see Civil War in a few days. I just can’t stomach how pure the Captain is without some serious Opiods. I mean the dude almost picked up Thor’s hammer (which, when did that become about purity? Thor’s an angry whore most of the time). That being said, I am looking forward to a little Marvel viewing. I remain surprised that there is no definable linkage (on the front end at least) between Agents of Shield and the movie. The Agents are busy busting down Hive and putting the last remnants of Hydra out of commission. They don’t appear to have anything to do with the Marvel movie universe at this point.

By the way, where is Nick Fury?

I’ll let that question rest because I know he isn’t in this new film. He isn’t scheduled to appear in any film during this phase. That disappoints me greatly. I felt there was a real connection between Fury and Cap and the tie back to the super serum. However, they seem to have done away with that entirely.

It is going to be very hard to escape the suppositions of metaphor. People are going to fight to compare this situation to our upcoming election, especially with Trump being one of two candidates (possibly the Iron Man). I can already see the connections, though I haven’t seen the script. I am assuming a lot comes from the groundbreaking comic book of the same name. In the comic a mutant named Speedball accidentally destroys the town of Stamford, Connecticut. This ramps up the already high talk of registering mutants (read: Muslims), and leads to Iron Man and Cap coming down on different sides of the issue.

You can see where people are going to take this. You’ll see where I take it saturday night.

li Apple? What did you just do word association and grab a position everyone needs more of? Not that I’m bitter, just confused. I recognize that Apple, a Buckeye star, is a legit player, but with the first round the idea is to address the most important team needs. We needed other stuff. Line stuff. LB stuff to be certain. These needs were addressed later in the draft but how well were they addressed?

I can’t really doubt the Giants in their draft acumen. You know exactly what you are going to get–60% success rate in the four year player range. Look at Amukara and most Giants WRs and you get a sense of what the team is going for lately in the draft.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m interested in having a summer home in Canada. I really want to see what that country is all about. We talk trash about it constantly in our culture, but what is really real? Maybe I will start with a plane ticket and some airbnb accommodations.
2. Students gave their final Dev ENG presentations and did well. I’m like a proud papa right now.
3. Terribly exhausted this evening and I think it has to do with two days no coffee

When I was a kid I watched a lot of the movies that people these days describe as classics. They had an impact on me. I’d even go so far as to say they heavily influenced my perceptions of social interaction and the idea of cool. I got a lot of ideas from old movies, and a surprisingly important idea from the old Karate Kid. No, I’m not talking about the ‘pro-america’ Will Smith effort, but the original wax on, wax off. That movie made me consider the idea of teaching without letting the students on to the fact they were being taught. I call this strategy the Miyagi hypothesis.

The hypothesis suggests that students are more inclined to learn information if they don’t know they are being taught. This is the deception parents use to slip in peas and carrots by calling it a pie. My specific use of this is in regards to learning. I want to be able to create an environment where learning happens without formal instruction–without students knowing they are being taught but learning nonetheless.

Several of my sociology students did their year-end presentation on the concept of role conflict and how it applies to their lives. The term is defined as “emotional conflict arising when competing demands are made on an individual in the fulfillment of his or her multiple social roles.” Watching them talk and the resulting discussions made me rethink my own role conflicts. I’m a writer, a boyfriend, a father, a teacher, and a coach. These things occupy the majority of my time and headspace, often overlapping and creating immense conflict. 

For example, I always have conflicts between work and parenting, because I want to come home and spend time with loved ones but I still have work to do. I still have writing that needs to get handled. Then I need to leave home not even two hours after the key hits the door in order to go be a coach. I’m not even going to get into how this has made my boyfriend role suffer (only got 10 min, folks).

For me the conflict centers around time and mental energy. Each role places significant demands on me and I am having to decide on a daily basis which role is going to be the so-called primary role for that day and receive the most attention. I’m certain this is what everyone goes through and I am just applying fancy terms to the age-old process of juggling responsibilities. Still, the terms help me to rationalize and quantify exactly how much is expected of me on a daily basis.

It is a lot.

Sometimes things get neglected and I sacrifice being effective at one role to really just maintain others. Luckily, I’m a professor, which means that I can enjoy two months of reduced labor in one role, giving me the time and energy to focus on others.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m still here. Didn’t quit the writing life. Never could if I tried.
2. There are things I do in life that are utterly frivolous and meaningless and quite probably a waste of my time. Facebook is, of course, one of those things. It is largely useless and inane, I still use it, and thats okay. My bestie recently asked my why I still look at posts and I really didn’t have a good answer. I decided this morning that I don’t need a ‘good answer’. Everyone has something that they do that is really useless and offers no gain from an outsiders perspective. This is relative as their ‘gain’ and your ‘gain’ might be very different. In other words, taking a moment to scroll through a handful of silly posts on facebook makes me happy for some reason and, since it doesn’t hurt anyone, I shouldn’t have to justify it. Like I said, we all have something like that. Some people have the Kardashians. I’ll try to be better about judging that too.
3.  Still having issues uploading from wordpress…

I must admit there are days where being a writer is the furthest thing from my mind and remembering to put words together is nearly impossible to do. When that happens writing can seem like an inconvenience. Who wants to to drop everything and spend ten minutes posting to a daily blog. It seems silly–meaningless even. I feel like that more than I want to admit. I don’t always want to string together words and continue this habit. And then when I do I think about the counter–2275 could easily be the last one and then I can finally exhale, skip one, and start over at one.

What would it matter?

I don’t think it would matter to anyone but me, and for me it would be a small yet powerful admittance of failure. It would reflect the moment I gave up and let the ideas of writing slide down the scale of importance to a place where it honestly could never come back from. Writing is something I love and take great pride in, but it is also the most difficult and often fruitless pursuit in my life. Like I wrote above, it wouldn’t matter to anyone to me that I quit and I could do so without anyone being the wiser.

But then I would know. I would remember every day that I laid down and gave up and then I wouldn’t have any credibility with myself. I wouldn’t feel like I had to keep going with anything I ever did when it came to writing. Clearly this wasn’t why I started the blog, but over time this is what it became. An outlet, a promise, and a daily rededication to the cause I hold most dear.