Month: October 2016

I am constantly amazed when I find synthesis between the secular and non-secular worlds. Often this happens in terms of sayings and phrases that people use in order to empower themselves. Mantras if you will. Adam Braun writes, “Speak the language of the person you wish to become.” which aligns with “Be the change you seek” etc. Braun, the founder of Pencils of Promise has five phrases he says can empower your life. In addition to the phrase above he writes, “Challenge your assumptions, so that you can find your truths… If you find your inherent truths you will never be led wrong.” This is one thing I’ve struggled with spiritually and practically over the course of my life.

I struggle with finding my truths and in that I struggle with identifying my purpose beyond what I’ve already done. No, this is not a mid-life crisis. I have struggled with this very thing since I was 12 years old. Back then I thought baseball was the answer. Two years later I thought football was the answer. Since then I have bounced back and forth between a number of possible truths and answers and ideas.

I think it might boil down to something a friend once said. Everything we do is about giving or receiving love. Perhaps a lot of what I do is to seek out love or even to give it. That ought to be an inherent truth. It also might be an assumption.

Some Thoughts:

1. Got into a discussion about gender roles in class and was instantly reminded of where I am. I live in AZ where gender stereotyping is so complete that the idea of a boy cooking in an easy bake oven automatically translates into ‘you’re making him soft’. No, I’m making him independent.

Sunday mornings are meant for Writer’s Group and football. I decided to skip group in order to go to an awards banquet for the boys. All three are AYF Scholar Ballers, achieving a 3.79 or higher GPA. I don’t know how much of a role I played in that other than constantly demanding they do homework. I don’t know that I’ve engaged in a home life that is built around study as many Tiger parents do. No, We are about having fun and playing sports. Moving forward I want to get back into guerrilla teaching and get the boys and myself engaged in applying academics and athleticism outside of the classroom and outside of the stripes.

I leave the balance of my time to some thoughts…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m bothered by the stupidity of political ads. The ‘Hillary Failed’ ad is among the worst. It lays at her feet the blame for ISIS, Russian aggression in Crimea, and a host of other things that were, honestly, beyond her scope in any role she has been in. It is as if they’re blaming her for her husband’s history and Obama’s history–which by the way were not bad at all. We ought to review the facts and speak towards actions. I don’t like Hillary–never have–but I recognize her ability and potency as a presidential candidate and would like to honestly consider her history as first lady, senator, and Secretary of State.
2. Still smarting over the loss to the Bandits. It sucks to see the kids work so hard to get somewhere and then not make it. Not to mention that as a coach and a dad I wanted it pretty bad myself. If I am going to talk about honesty then I need to own my own ego in this position.
3. As I type the Cleveland Browns are battling the Jets. Browns are thumping them pretty good. Still, faith leads me to say I don’t know who is going to win. That bugs me, because it should be a no-brainer. The Jets should be dominating. I guess the Jets just aren’t that good on either side of the ball.
4. I find that I work better sitting at a table. It has to be a table that requires chairs–not sitting on the floor with a computer on the table or sitting on my couch or leaning back in my desk chair.

It is near midnight and I am finally sitting down to write this out. Things started out this morning at a forgettable school in a cookie cutter corner of Nowhere, AZ. My team took on the Bandits, hoping to advance to the championship game at ASU. No such luck. We didn’t play our best game and topped out at third place.

It matters. It isn’t the end of the world or anything that is important beyond the day, but it matters. Meaning is what you make of it. We provide the meaning to our lives, our actions, our words. We poured hours and weeks and months into the enterprise of football with the expectation of going to the championship. Instead we are going home.

It matters.

It matters that the kids learned about defeat and humility and patience. It matters that they had fun playing a game and worked together and stood up for one another. It matters that they care about their team and what they created there.

That is where the mattering ends. See, it is just a game and it is all about the kids. Afterwards we went to IKEA for lunch, the mattering of it all largely shelved with the promise of a spring season months down the road. Until then we are going to be in the woods like Rocky, training to put our bodies in peak condition so that we are ready to do this once again.

I guess we might have a little fun doing it too.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Fact: Trump supporters don’t care that he’s lying. It is completely irrelevant to the point they are trying to make, which is that they have a ‘memory’ of the Clinton administration which is largely reinforced by Fox News and Breitbart et al, driving a message home that democrats are destroying the fabric of our nation and the dwindling republican voice is the only thing standing in their way. All of which is utter bollocks. This is also the reason that a overstated email ‘conspiracy’ has risen to the point of a probable impeachment hearing her second day in office.

I took the time to listen to an entire Trump stump speech. I had to. I have to fully believe I am making the right choice with my vote. Now I am certain. I cannot in good faith vote for Donald Trump because he has no plan or any real expectation of forming a plan that supports and promotes what I see as American values.

This is not about Clinton. I know exactly what Clinton offers. I saw and later reviewed her history as a first lady, a senator, and most recently Secretary of State. That last roll is what has her in hot water with voters. The ’email scandal’ is born out of a failed effort to pin the ‘Benghazi scandal’ square on the shoulders of Clinton. In one of many many many hearings and probes the email server was discovered and that became the new scandal–the new dog whistle for the party loyal. Here is what it really boils down to: Even they know the candidate their party chose is not someone they can stand behind. SO they made it about ‘how corrupt she is’.

So I listened and I waited to see him say something of value; waited for words that indicated a political strategy that could survive the rigors of congress. Nope. Not a real thing. He did nothing over the course of the speech but spit hate at Clinton and blame the media for, well, everything. While hate is sustainable it is not productive in the political realm. It is not what we need leading our nation through what looks to be headed towards being a tough and delicate time in our history.

Right now we need someone a bit smarter.

Recently someone tried to hack my facebook. I don’t know why. It isn’t as if I am the cornerstone of a major social network that, with the proper entry, can help someone uncover the darkest patterns in the world’s buying habits…

Clearly my creativity is not entirely dead. Instead it goes into these patterns of hibernation, awakening, bear-like at the first sign of literary opportunity. Turns out opportunity is there so long as I slog through the load of random emails teeming in my inbox. I gotta get a better system of clearing out that stuff, because I missed out on a number of solid writing opportunities purely through the inability to successfully navigate a google inbox.

No, tech has not passed me by, nor has responsibility overwhelmed me. I just pick and choose the focal things and lately the filters are not doing me any favors.

So what now? Back to basics. I tune up this weekend for the coming NanoWrimo and hammer out a cavalcade of words that jumpstart me back into the writer’s life. Desmond Tutu once said, “If you want to be a good writer, you are not going to become one by always going to the movies and eating bonbons. You have to sit down and write, which can be very frustrating, and yet without that you would not get that good result.”

There are many things in life that frustrate me. One in particular sits on my prefrontal cortex wreaking a certain kind of havoc–the havoc of wanting and not having. Still, it is a wonderful opportunity to learn how to separate pain from suffering. One does not, in fact, have to lead to the other. Likewise, a life in which you focus on being good to your kids doesn’t have to be entirely about your kids. There ought to be time for you in there too.

All of this randomness. Thus go the inner workings of the writer’ brain.

 

There are a great many things that people do to occupy their time. Less and less, I study football player metrics in order to determine the best fantasy lineup for a given week. you can tell I’ve been at it less, because I am losing ‘big league’ in my solo league. The league is a Two-QB league and my Qb’s are trash. I have Big Ben (O), Brian Hoyer (IR), Russel Wilson, and Paxton Lynch. In other words I have one actual starting QB for the rest of the regular fantasy season. My league is gangster and the other teams are offering junk for my best players, just because they know I need a QB. My record is 2-5 and looks like it is about to get worse.

Given that information, why would anyone take my advice on players to pick. Well, that is why I stopped offering it. Still, I have a pretty good handle on teams. Save for a total misread of the Cardinals v. Seahawks game, I’ve been decently accurate about such things. Lets see if that trend continues in future weeks. I’ll only give you the facts this week. No color commentary. No summation. Just the facts.

The Facts:

TEN over JAX
CIN over WAS
NE over BUF
ARI over CAR
NYJ over CLE
DET over HOU
KC over IND
SEA over NO
OAK over TB
SD over DEN
GB over ATL
DAL over PHI
MIN over CHI

Any good writer will tell you there are at least three rules to being a good writer.

1. You gotta write a lot in order to be a good writer. Of course, writing a lot in of itself doesn’t make you good. Bad writers can hammer out the same swill over and over again, never improving one iota; never moving the dial an inch, because they don’t have the context of how to do that. No, they need our second rule.
2. You gotta read a lot in order to be a good writer. This includes reading things that are not necessarily in your wheelhouse. Good writing is just flat out good writing. Please read heavily from your chosen genre, but please also develop a reading habit around books that are flat out and notably good.
3. Goals make great writers. If you are not writing with purpose then most of the best ideas are overlooked or flat out tossed in the trash for lack of inspiration.

Those are the three that carry you as you move forward.

I’m not entirely sure how to start this one. I wanted to write something positive–perhaps about writing itself–but that emotion is not finding me today. Instead I’m typing against the background chorus of hundreds of fingers drumming out their own ten minute rule in the first ten minutes of my English class.

I started teaching with the one for one idea. I expected to find someone to replace me, figuring that if I could find one person with the passion to teach then they would not only succeed me, but they would elevate the teaching to the next level. It became my passion for a time. I found this really incredible girl named Rachel who was writer material as well as teacher material. We fell out of touch, so I never learned if she was ‘the one’. I did stumble across another student at a writing conference three years ago who had turned to the profession. She officially serves as ‘the one’ meaning I did my job here. I’ve replaced myself. What happens once you’ve been replaced? I find that I think about that in all aspects of my life.

I think that idea of replacement and of finding a path, purpose, challenge, point is weighing pretty heavy on my heart these days. Recently I had a deep and meaningful conversation that caused me to reflect on who I am and what I have done with my life. The results of that conversation both shocked and dismayed me. Over half way through my life arc I have not reached a point where I can say I replaced myself–three kids and a replacement teacher.

What I’ve done outside of self-replication is another matter entirely. It is the question that keeps me up at night.

Take a look at a blog from two years ago and you’ll find me in more or less in the same space I am now. Perhaps worse. The difference is a thunderous awareness of what is holding me back and, honestly, who I have been over the last twenty years or so. I think I had my own flashpoint back in college when I made choices that took me one direction as opposed to the other, and along the chosen path I sacrificed a lot of the passion I have for the important things in life.

Such as?

That is a post for another day, and a conversation that I need to develop more in order to determine how to move forward.

Some Thoughts:

1. Darelle Revis is having the worst year of his HOF football career. He has been horrible in coverage and worse as a tackler, both hallmarks of his game. 80% of balls thrown his way are completed passes. He’s given up short routes, first down routes, deep routes… He ought to give back his cleats.
2. If likes are the bellweather of the attention one gets online then I have received 0 attention since October 15th. I don’t always check these things and clearly don’t measure whether or not I write or what I write based on likes, but as a feeling human, it does suck.
3. As a writer, I have thick enough skin to deal.
4. We are on our way to the Semi-finals of the AZ-AYF Mighty Mite Youth Football Playoffs. That is a mouthful. We face the West Valley Bandits, last year’s national champions and the odds on favorite to do big things again this year. However, we have the better team. So long as we manage our players and stay healthy, we got this.

Who speaks for us? The question is not one of politics per say, but about identifying the voice that resonates across a generation. Morrison and Ellis created a comic book character that was meant to be the living embodiment of a generation. Now in terms of music there is not really one overall artist but it can be said that there is one per genre. Only one Micheal Jackson exists, only one Bob Dylan, etc.

So I say again, who speaks for us? Who is the voice that encompasses the latest generation? I feel like we’ve fallen into comedy in a special way again. The way that a generation grew up around Richard Pryor is the same way a generation grew up around Jon Stewart. I miss Stewart, but I’m not sure he is the voice.

I am not sure who is.

Some Thoughts:

1. John Oliver? Yes, please.
2. First week of playoffs and we got a win.