Month: July 2016

I’m excited for Madden. The last one didn’t go over too well for me. My favored franchise mode didn’t have as much appeal as in past years. I’m expecting the new updates to really impact this mode. I wish I had a lot more to say on the subject but I’m clearly tapped out on both words and consciousness. In the meanwhile I’ll leave you with…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Lately I’ve been feeling a story coming on. This one is rooted in that old human fear that something sinister exists just beyond the edge of our vision. It waits and watches and we can only glimpse moments of it–just enough to leave us terrified.
2. Trump is a moron. So I guess there’s a lot of that going around. That or there is a deeper more fundamental issue at work here that requires a thorough analysis.

I almost didn’t write this. I was laying in bed playing that damnable Clash Royale, willing myself to a state of tiredness when an alarm went off in my head. It bleeped, when did you blog? I hadn’t and that realization upset me. I call it a function of my overwhelming day. I’m happy to be a dad, but I can tell you that there are days when it is just too much. Today was such a day. We were cooped up in the house and everyone wanted my full attention all day long. I walked to a chorus of ‘Daddy!’ as if it were the themesong from Shaft.

Or the Exorcist.

Even the bathroom was no place to hide from the hounds of youth. They came on relentlessly, anxious to share every excruciating moment of their day. Like I said, it happens from time to time and it drains my battery to zero. That sucks, because the next day (Wednesday) I teach and if I’m lucky I spend a few moments with the love of my life trying to make that situation work.

I really hope it does work. Overall, I’m not that bad of a guy. I’m a much better guy with her, and I’m lucky to have her. Supposedly we are both lucky. I’m lucky to have the family I have. These kids mean the world to me, and I hope I mean the world to them. Its hard to deny that when they’re battling for your attention all day.

Some Thoughts:

1. I grew used to people ‘liking’ my posts. I suppose it was an ego stroke that made me feel like what I was saying was relevant to more than just me. Since I stopped sharing these to Facebook the likes have gone away, which is a clear reflection of the fact that the likes were convenience based–just like most everything else in modern society.
2. My dog declared war on my rugs. One room at a time. He must be stopped.
3. My Gencon pipe dream is over. Next year for sure.
4. Watching my kids develop into solid athletes without the daily pressure of home practice is cool. Now lets see what happens when I make them work for it at home…
5. Grrr… That feeling when you accidentally click ‘add to dictionary’ and know the words you tend to mess up will be messed up forever.

I had the joy of watching Signs again today. The M. Night Shymalan film is one of a handful of his films that were incredible works of story and cinematography in the vein of Hitchcock. Yet for all of the wonder of what he can do his work is often met with shrugs or outright laughter. This is not entirely his fault. See, I watched the film with my class today and when the creature (mostly hidden for the first 50 minutes of the film) is revealed, they laughed. They saw the creature and it was not at all what they expected. It clearly wasn’t frightening enough and, as a result, when a character jumped back and screamed, that reaction didn’t match their own level of fright and surprise. The result was their laughter.

I immediately wondered why this reaction happened. I think I have it sorted out. The students had expectations of a creature that was truly menacing and terrifying. They expected something that would force them into a fear state–likely accompanied by a jump scare and other standard fear images (blood, weapons, mutilated bodies, etc.). None of these things accompanied the Bigfoot-esque image of an alien walking across screen, and as a result they had no proper frame of reference to analyze this scene as frightening. This is an inherent property of P-zeds.

I think we have become numb to new input that is expected to conjure existing feelings. I think I’d say more but we are out of time.

 

Lately I’ve been spending time with Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It’s a good and instructional book that should be taken with a grain of salt. Everything should. This particular author has managed to turn her personal neuroses into a successful business a la Stephen King. Well, maybe not quite like King. What she has done to great success is remind people that we all tend to have too much stuff and that stuff often takes over our lives. I live in a 4000 sq ft home filled with so much nonsense that I could be easily mistaken for a hoarder. I plan to downsize, and I plan for this dear lady’s words to help.

 

Part of this process is a return to listing in a very over exaggerated fashion. I discovered during a recent writing project that allotting specific hours of the day to jobs that needed to be handled really helped me to stay on pace. I discovered after that when I carried that information and list of responsibilities in my head, nothing got done. So, I’m going to be listing everything in my daily calendar as though I am the CEO of talislegger INC. Even factoring in ‘me time’ becomes important, because when you have so much that needs to be accomplished then often you get overwhelmed and burn out.

The elephant in the room is the sheer amount of stuff I need to get handled. My dude (brother from another mother, Dat n***a D, etc.) flew in last week and immediately recognized the need for me to automate some of these processes. This is true, as is the need to make the time and space for doing that while learning how to reduce the number of things that I do. I write, I teach, I’m a Dad sans wife (but my lady has my back there), I coach, I want to play video games, I want to get healthy, but I need to clean my house and pay my bills first. There are at least a dozen other smaller tasks that occupy my CPU to the point where the background processes get largely ignored. So, yeah, I gotta cut back.

I need to make the time to prioritize and repair and then I need to prioritize, limit, and automate moving forward. Thus sayeth the talislegger. So it shall be done

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The way I used to distribute info about this blog was through facebook. I think I am going to do that primarily through twitter (and maybe some corresponding link to my new video feed?) moving forward. Maybe not.

I wanted to step away from politics to discuss something a little closer to my heart: The names we black people give ourselves. I’m going to refrain from saying African-American, because the name doesn’t properly represent the diaspora of dark-skinned people who take root in the United States whether brought here by force or delivered by choice. Furthermore, African-American highlights many groups including a significant portion of the Brazilian population that doesn’t define itself as North American (or even black for that matter).

I come to this 10 minute conversation because of a kid named Zaevion Dobson. He came to my attention as the post-mortem recipient of the 2016 Arthur Ashe award. He died while shielding his family and friends from nearby gunfire. This didn’t happen in a desert trench. It happened in Knoxville, Tennessee.

This all merely establishes the name. He has a strange one, and it is common among black people to have odd names. These are only odd because they don’t seem to connect to some deeply rooted cultural history. Here’s the thing though: The names do represent a culture and a history. It is the culture and history of that particular diaspora of people who look like me and ended up on the North American continent largely severed from any other identity. So, these names are an effort to connect (in what ways we can) to the place we presume we came from and to introduce our own inflection to that history.

Some Thoughts:

1. I have a way too quiet voice. Fact.

I think its going to be Cory Booker. After the Pence debacle I recognized that this year’s VP search is still more of a punch-counterpunch situation. The RNC threw the first punch and landed a die-hard conservative and tea party hack who has a history of limiting religious freedoms in the name of preserving religious freedoms. Even a near-racist rag like the National Review didn’t forget that one. This, of course, is where Trump gets his info and likely why he waffled on the pick at the end. So we are greeted with the Icons of Old America (making it great again) vs. Hillary, the first female pres nominee and, well, who else but the black guy?

I wish it didn’t come down to this, but Booker is charismatic and draws votes. I don’t know enough about his policy yet, but I will quickly unravel that history to the core of what he stands for. He’s black, which polarizes a fair number of voters and may serve to energize the democratic base enough to convince people to vote in this election–even when Trump eventually offers them money not to.

 

Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted very much to see the world. He worked every day to afford a computer and one special day he discovered he’d made enough to buy one. The man at the store offered him several different models of computer, each prettier and with more buttons and sparkles than the next. The boy was smart and he didn’t have terribly much money, so he bought the computer that he could afford, passing on all the higher end models. This made the man angry, because he was a very bad man indeed and wanted all of the boys money.

 

The boy went home and tried to do things on his computer, but there were not very many things to do. He wanted to play games, but there weren’t any. The man had games, but he wanted more money for them. The boy heard there were games in this magical place called the internet, but he didn’t have the internet. The man sold the internet too. It cost a lot of money and you had to pay for it over and over again—every month. Everything the boy wanted seemed to be controlled by the man and seemed to demand that the boy find and deliver more and more money.

 

This made the boy sad. This made the boy want to stop wanting things, but he couldn’t. So the boy worked harder and gave more and more money to the man in order to get all the nice the nice things he wanted for his computer.

 

This, sadly is more reality than fairy tale. The boy and the man dance around these issues every day and the boy never ever truly wins. The man always gets his money.

Most people I talk to about the election ultimately feel like their vote doesn’t matter much. They also tend to feel like the Presidency is somehow less important that the corporate masters who are pulling the strings. I no longer feel both answers are Yes. The first, the idea of the vote mattering, has been questioned and deconstructed and analyzed to the point where we know exactly how much a vote matters and where it matters more or less. Vote is simply an affirmation of coalition. Depending on where you exist, the coalition ratio could be such where your vote matters. In Arizona the vote is starting to matter. We have a growing coalition of voters who do not walk in step with the fractioning Republican party. Therefore, what you vote and who you vote for has an impact and can, with significant numbers, point to the formation of a new coalition. This is how the Tea Party rose to power. This is also how the Tea Party disappeared into the folds of the Republican Party.

This idea of coalition is central to human understanding. Anthropology Professor John Tooby writes, “Our brains are not designed to attend to race… Instead, they are designed to attend to coalition—and race gets picked up only as long as it predicts who is allied with whom. This is why successful politicians like Benjamin Disraeli, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Barack Obama need not be ethnically the same as the majority of their supporters. Coalition is the real coin of the evolved mind, not race.” As we begin to climb deeper into an age where the internet is becoming our primary means of social communication this idea of coalition is becoming not only more important but deeply relevant to the continuing conversation about how we form cultures and align ourselves.

I’m beat.

It is no surprise that the days I spend with my kids are the ones I find the most taxing. This really boils down to putting a lot of work into making sure the kids have stuff to do and are enjoying the summer. The result is me drained beyond reason by the end of the night and unable to get anything of value done. So the work piles up into the next day and that day winds up being terribly work heavy and draining. And so on.

I used to be able to escape into a video game to relieve the stress of these days but nowadays I’m too tired for even that. The work, of course, suffers as a result. This is why I’m looking forward to summer being over.

I’ll do my best to enjoy the end of it.

At the end of a long day I’m that happy sort of tired and only 10 minutes away from a god night’s sleep. I got to put eyeballs on the Galley’s for my newest project, which is always a wonderful experience. Forget seeing your stuff on shelves. That’s cool but it is a completely public experience. Sitting at home with the pre-release and knowing this is the result of your hard work is exactly where its at for me. NDA dictates that I don’t say too much, but it is an anthology piece.

Today I wound up in what I now see as a useless ‘conversation’ with a 12 year old about the importance of knowing the parts of a sentence. He felt it was utterly useless information to have. I objected, started something resembling a lecture, and then his brother and sister flew to his aid like dolphins fighting off a shark. I suppose the deeper argument is that he doesn’t feel a lick different than my college students do. Few care about English class and care even less about the form and structure of the language itself.

I’ve grown used to caring about stuff that is largely useless to everyone else. Case and point, I know a tremendous amount about Pokemon.  I know far less about the effects of sleep deprivation–mostly because I’m victimized by it weekly. But not tonight. No right now I get to go to sleep