Month: August 2016

Race night is going to become a thing.

I’ve started getting into these themed nights, but with this one I think we struck a bit o gold. Tonight’s theme consisted of a series of matchbox car races throughout the house. Between the races we played games of Rocket League and Forza 6. The movie of the evening is Need for Speed. This is an unabashed homage to Smokey and the Bandit that I did not really care for the first time around but now within the boundaries of theme the movie fits really well.

Food hasn’t arrived yet and we are snacked up pretty good, but in future iterations (there are like 700 Fast and Furious films to go through and then so much more) we are going to have to get better about the food and the guest list.

So what do we do next time? That remains to be seen and viciously enjoyed. Yeah, I said vicious.

Some Thoughts:

1. Do cats eat peanut butter?
2. City of Mirror’s fights to walk the line between fantasy and literature. I’m loving it. I won’t review it because it can’t be reviewed out of context just yet…

Twas the Friday before classes
and my mind was a mess
Would I be ready for Monday?
Oh my what a test

Excite was pouring like sweat from my pores
Would the students be ready for what I have in store?

The semester is one that I am looking forward to
A special Honors project holds it together like glue

Tis the semester of voting, of conferences, of fun
Tis the semester of me getting my shit done.

 

…

 

Okay that is about all I was able to generate in such a short time frame. I think a lot of it is lack of practice. When you become one dimensional as a writer then other forms begin to suffer.

That is all.

 

 

I’m gonna talk football. Digital football to be specific. According to UPS my copy of Madden 17 just left Kansas and is due to arrive by 8/24 end of day. The game comes courtesy of some scut work I did for a textbook provider I don’t actually use in the classroom. That is the beauty of such things: I can be real honest about the product I’m not beholden to.

I’m beholden to madden in a certain sense, because it is the only product on the market. That is likely why I was not honest about the level of utter suck last year. It was so bad that I failed to complete a ten year franchise and basically went back to the PS3 version of madden 25. At least the ads were good. They’ve gotten even  better:

The game looks better and appears to hold more promise for all modes of value to me. I may even try to do the game as a player. Couldn’t be better than the 2k modality but who knows how good it could be? The largest change is the joy my youngest gets out of the game, with him now being a QB/RB and wearing my one time #14. I’m a bit stoked to share the new game with him but more stoked to play it myself on those late thursday evenings when the game is on on screen and the video game is on another. #firstworldglee

Some Thoughts:

1. All this really means is that there is a madden 10 minute review on the way and it ought to be a doozy.
2. School is also on the way. Monday. Holy crap I’m not ready to meet 150 new students and be responsible for their academic success… I need another drink.

A few weeks ago I fixed my shower.

In the greater scheme of things this is not a big deal; the expected chores of masculinity. However, in my life it represented a tectonic shift back towards an understanding that I can in fact handle my business. My pride took a hit a few years back at the hands of a rough divorce and resultant financial downfall. Several other social situations conspired to feed into my near depressive state and drive my self confidence to record lows. It was noticeable. The teaching suffered. The writing dried up. The home life went to crap. The love life wobbled on the brink of oblivion, curling back and forth over the edge like a drunk ballerina.

I didn’t have any real wins. Then I fixed the shower. Like I said, not momentous, but for me it was a moment of revelation. I realized that if I worked hard enough I could actually achieve all that stuff I spent time acting like I could easily accomplish. Turns out its real, mostly. I can achieve whatever I set my heart to (within reason) but it takes a lot of hard work that I don’t always want to do. It is also a lot more than the typical writerly Butt-in-Chair philosophy. It takes the mindset and mental peace to use that time effectively. I’m learning.

Some Thoughts:

1. Got the kids to school in time to play in the yard before class. Also not a big deal, but it means we are back on track here at the TalisHouse. Maybe that means these blogs start tipping back up towards 500 words?
2. And then I noticed it wasn’t Tuesday but Wednesday… so that happened.

 

The boys asked me for a theme night. They’ve fallen into such things lately. They’ve been exposed to Harry Potter night (complete with a homegrown tri-wizard tourney) and Dragon Ball Z night (with an outdoor movie-style projection and associated gameplay). Now they feel the Need for Speed.

Race car night is set to happen this Saturday, the day before the older two take the court in Suns Arena for their final basketball game of the season and one week before the AYF Tackle Football season gets underway. In sum, this is our last gasp of a summer vacation-esque weekend. The festivities will include a first look at the Rocket League racing/automobile-soccer game and an epic hot wheels racing extravaganza throughout the house.

Now all I gotta figure out is what to feed them. I mean, what do racers eat? They never actually make a big deal of such things on screen unless you’re counting Ricky Bobby…

Some Thoughts:

1. I have been in programming hell for a few days now. It started with the effort to get the blog back to posting to facebook (not easy) after a brief flirtation with cancelling facebook. Seriously, reactivating after deactivating facebook is harder and more cumbersome than getting a new credit card number after a hack. Of course, nobody knew I was gone, so there’s that.
2. Then I tried to update another site I run and that whole thing collapsed and shattered in dramatic fashion. 40 bucks later I’m still picking up the digital debris.
3. On a positive note, this one ought to publish to the book of many faces. Let me know if it did, okay?

Entering the first week of my schools ‘pre-season’ I’m clearly rusty. I haven’t gotten the syllabi or content to where it ought to be at this time and I need to move it in that direction quickly in order to have the time to relax and reflect on the upcoming 17 weeks.

I’m not talking about sports here; not in the traditional sense. This is more about the way I try to hype up for what is essentially a mindsucking experience. I have to be ready to deal with the complaints and degradation and overall nonsense associated with student learning. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Today I had a student begin the process of filing a grievance against me, because I failed to grade an assignment she resubmitted. Two things here: 1. I let her resubmit the assignment though I clearly state in the syllabus how assignments ought to be submitted (she did it wrong) and late work will not be accepted. So, I was a nice guy and got screwed for it. 2. She earned an A in the class and still is pissed about the one assignment. Now add in a diverse group of students ranging from those with mental disabilities to near genius intellect and you get my average day.

For those who think teaching is easy work that anyone can do, I say try it. For those who think teachers don’t work hard or have a cushy job, I say try it. I admit we get a lot of time off but the time on is really about being on–like on stage–for a legitimate period of time every day. The time off the clock is still about grading and handling other responsibilities of a residential faculty outside of your limited office hours.

I’ll climb off my high horse. Yeah, it looks easy the way the good ones present it because we make it look that way. In other words, we put in the hard work when you aren’t looking and calling us lazy.

 

I spent some time today listening to Angela Maiers ted talk on people mattering to each other. Maiers reminds her audience that it is a simple step to remind people that they matter, but it is something that few of us bother to do. Why? Because often few of us realize or even reflect on our own mattering. I have some objections or reframing to those arguments. I believe most of us feel like we matter to someone. I feel like we don’t entirely recognize how or even that we matter beyond that tiny circle we define as either our family or our close acquaintances.

This blog is proof that I want to matter to someone outside of the handful of people who still love me. I write for ten minutes every day but I don’t have to publicize it. Today I reactivated the facebook stream that reminds people who are my facebook friends that I’ve said something. I did so because it is important to me that I matter in some sense. I am a writer and I don’t think you can be a writer–published or otherwise–and not want to matter to someone outside of yourself or small circle of friends.

Knowing that it is important that we know we matter is going to be a fundamental tenet of my class this semester, because I have noticed that people believe they matter especially less during voting season. I hope to change that philosophy for them and for these students to go out and change that philosophy for someone else.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to build a Juggs machine. I’ve been trying to figure out a lot of things lately. I feel like the people who know how to build stuff are better off financially and perhaps feel happier and more accomplished. Do-it-yourself is the pre-maker’s movement. Learning how to do things you’ve never done before shows the elasticity of the brain and keeps you feeling relatively young. The key here is relative.

Some Thoughts:

1. First scrimmage of this young tackle football season. Our starters are ready but our newer players are not close. This is worse on the tiny mite team where the lack of talent is really glaring. I wish I knew how to help with that one.

11.11: I woke last night around 2 AM, barely thirty minutes after I originally went to sleep. My youngest was standing in my doorway, wanting to crawl into bed and into the comfort of family and safe, warm, space. Something about the moment terrified me. It wasn’t so much the surprise of him standing there as it was a memory of my own youth and the terror that evening often brought. I was-am-afraid of dying. It isn’t the part after you are dead but the moment itself when you see yourself slipping away, as if someone opened a giant trap door into your life and everything below you is blackness.

What scares me most of all is the recognition of no longer being me–no longer having a sense of this life, loves, family. They will continue on in my absence and, in time, think of me only as a distant memory. I will not be able to see them grow old and love and find family and happiness. I mean, I know little about the hour of my death and could live to 100, but the idea of dying itself is terrifying.

I don’t think it is something you get over. You shelve it, pushing it deep into your sub conscious in the places it cannot be reached until that memory of fear is torn free to envelop you.

Some Thoughts:

1. Being this morbid is awful. This, along with the occasional lack of motor control and hallucinations are the hallmarks of a lack of sleep.
2. Dog has completely given up on peeing outdoors. Not good…

 

I’ve come to the conclusion that reality is fairly irrelevant. I didn’t think so at first, but the more I see what is happening around me the more I recognize the statement to be utterly true. From Trump’s fallacious ‘people are saying’ to the short-sightedness of people drawn to true/false based answers, the reality I deal with every day allows room for vast interpretation. Trevor Noah took a stab at this recently, comparing Trump to ‘the dress’ meme people couldn’t get away from. Is it gold? is it black? Well, reality is nuanced. We elected Obama under the understanding he would pull all troops out of Iraq and let them deal with their own shit. He did so and ISIS formed. Now we are blaming the man for ISIS and the “growing threat to US security” which is largely false.

No, Mr. Trump, Obama did not found ISIS. What he did do was respond to the desires and will of the American people–a will that shifted into ‘why did you leave?!” mode once we got out and shit got real. In other words, he did what is about to happen with the Brexit. I bet they’ll blame that one on David Cameron. I bet he quit to dodge that exact bullet.