Month: January 2018

I woke up this morning thinking about my favorite horror writers and how they are often inspired by the things that scare them. I believe I thought this because I had a terrible nightmare. I don’t remember what the nightmare was, but I know it felt real at the time and actually concluded before I woke up. I believe I lived. regardless, it made me want to do a short list of…

Things I’m Afraid Of:

1. A foreign cat (or other animal) bursting through my doggie door. It happened once before at another house. A black cat tried to get in and it led to an epic cat fight between it and my previous cat. My cat won, but I still had to draw my sword–just in case. Yes, I have a sword. Several, in fact. I suppose I am that guy.
2. Being attacked at night. I rarely sleep with the door open. The fear is that there is going to be someone in the house with me and I’ll see their shadow crest my bedroom (or stairwell) doorway before I actually see them. It is that moment of terror, when the shadow tells the coming of the enemy, that I fear more than anything else in that scenario.
3. Falling asleep on the road. There is a particular stretch of highway that I drive which makes me sleepy every time I drive it. I believe the issue is psychological. The road is incredibly boring with few twists and turns. It would be so easy to just…
4. Already having fallen asleep on the road and being dead now and living a dream before dying. Nobody knows what death is or has any idea about the perception of time prior to shutdown. It could be an eternity. It could be a loop–where we live our lived over and again trying to make different choices or stuck with the same ones, remembering more and more of the choices we made in previous iterations until life becomes groundhog day and you’re stuck living through the same pleasures and pains and never escaping and never having the chance to do more than just wait for it.
5. Being alone. I love being alone, probably because it is a choice. But what if it wasn’t. What if nobody did love me or want to spend time with me or want to see me? Then it wouldn’t be a choice. It would be a cell.

Alexa keeps the time for my blog. She ticks through ten minutes quietly and at the end she hums a sweet lullaby to coax me away from the page. I used to write on pages. I used to read. I used to do a great number of things that formed the rituals of my youth. As I watch my young sprout into adulthood I find my rituals changing and theirs to be entirely foreign to me.

I built my first computer in my senior year of high school. We were a version of poor, so I couldn’t keep what I built. The school claimed the work and took it apart almost as fast as I built it, so the next kid who came along with empty pockets would also have a chance to learn. I did learn, and then I learned to never look back. I later built a string of computers in college, each more progressively powerful and conversely less complicated than the last. Desktop technology gave birth to laptop technology and I became hooked. Now I listen to more books in a month than I will read by eye in a year. I type almost everything, each iteration made simpler by the cut and paste technology so prevalent in our word processing platforms. I save things in the cloud. I collaborate on multiple screens. I blog.

I don’t journal. I struggle to maintain a physical calendar. 95 out of 100 meals I’ll prepare come out of a freezer bag. All of this is very different from how I was raised. All of this is, in some way, called progress. It is not my time to decide whether or not any or all of this is good. I am in a more reflective space about these things now. I’m considering how much of the old ways I really want to hold on to, how much of those ways can be integrated into the modern times, and how much of the old actually mattered in a lasting and fundamental way. Not all new is good and not all old is bad. Deciding the percentage breakdown is a highly personal endeavor.

I don’t want to talk about stealing right now. Part of the beauty of this blog for me is the free wheeling nature of it. I can talk about real life one day, rant the next, follow that up with a writing lesson, and move right on to whatever. So long as I hit ten minutes, I’m good. Today (tonight) I want to talk about politics. In the midsts of all the speculation about whether or not Oprah should run for president, we are forgetting that the 4th estate is really not doing their job right now. They haven’t done their job for a long while, and this is largely a result of the shifting nature of news as it relates to capitalism. Spotlight is secondary to Sales. Beyond that (and perhaps more aptly a full part of it…) the tendency to cater to audience is out of control. Case and point: In the run up leading to the primaries, Donald Trump was a joke and Fox News made sure we knew that. Once he was the guy their audience had to vote for, he became a pillar of the American psyche. They literally changed the way the covered the man as well as what they had to say about the man in order to pander to their audience. To… give the people what they want.

On the other end of that oh so long spectrum, CNN is losing its collective mind over Oprah giving a great speech. NBC followed suit with a tweet basically naming her the next president. FOX went ballistic over that, pointing at media bias. Of course Pot, meet Kettle, but who really notices anymore.

I think that is the real tragedy here. We do not care to notice such things, and we are slowly becoming numbed to the moronic nature of our President and everything else we don’t care to confront.

When I was a kid I stole money from my mom’s purse. I stole money from my Gammy’s purse too. I’m not proud of this. At the time I felt it was a necessary evil; a short and sharp thrill that put me in fair standing with the other kids in my universe. There wasn’t a lot of money in my life back then. I took a bus to school on the upper east side, walking whenever I lost my bus pass. I sat in a classroom with kids whose parents were CEOs, powerful lawyers, and TV stars. I was a kid from harlem who tried to fit in. Fitting in meant money.

We were not entirely poor. I think that is the key argument I’m making here. My mom had a little money. When my father was alive we had a boat and a car and went fishing at least once a month. This is the sort of thing that is unheard of for an inner city kid. After he died the money went away. It didn’t dry up. My mom just was tighter on the purse strings than he was. She was a bootstrapper and believed that I needed to make my own way. Of course I wasn’t allowed to have a job, so there was no actual way to make my own way. In truth I think she wanted me to depend on her in order to have anything. I did.

The problem with dependence is that you no longer have control of what you have. I lived in a world full of kids who had everything they wanted, and I was the kid who hung out with them and couldn’t even go to the candy store when they did. That worked okay for a while, but as we grew older and were given more freedom to wander away from the school, my friends started bringing lunches or jogging down to the hot dog cart by the MET. They changed. The social dynamic changed. My home life did not change.

That’s how I wound up taking money out of my mom’s purse.

There is more to the story there, and maybe I’ll tell it the next time I get 10 minutes.

Recently my garbage disposal broke, which led to a number of basic changes in the way I deal with dishes. I needed to move the side of the sink I wash on. I needed to actually wash my dishes (water from the dishwasher moves through the disposal side and leaks all over the kitchen floor). I needed to move everything out from under the sink in order to clean out the space and clear out the space for the future unit. All of these things I classify as first world problems that hardly rise to the importance of a blog (again, a blog itself is some first world shit indeed). Still, if you add them all together it does point to an thought worthy moment–I had to go back to basic rituals regarding the washing of my dishes. I had to walk to a separate space to get the things I needed to in order to hand wash my dishes, which in itself is a ritualistic process. I felt like a kid again. In that moment I was mindful of the task at hand. In that moment I was thinking and feeling and reflecting on what I was actually doing. This is quite different from the fire and forget method of dishwasher based washing.

All too often I find myself moving past and through tasks without ever considering what it is I am doing. The monotony of daily tasks is important. The ritual of such things are grounding mechanisms that root us in our daily lives and serve as an opportunity for self reflection. The only way to ask myself, ‘What am I doing’ is if I am taking the moment to do something as opposed to spending my thought cycles hunting the next task. This latter process happens the majority of the time for me, and the detrimental effects are clear.

Lately I have become aware of a strong mass media push for the idea of mindfulness. I don’t know where it comes from or do I think that part truly matters. Mindfulness is a core tenet of the Buddhist faith, and something I’ve become more and more aware of as I continue to expand my knowledge of that faith. I feel that it is extremely important to remain mindful, and ritual–whatever that ritual might be–is a place in which we are given a free moment to do so. I intend to be more mindful of that fact. I intend to hold on to more basic daily rituals and appreciate them for what they are.

Tonight it is just…

Some Thoughts:

1. There is a very good reason I don’t pick football games professionally. I suck at it. I mean look at today: KC — OUT. Rams — OUT. Those were my dark horse contenders for the AFC and NFC championships respectively. I’m not good at that.
2. Been sick the last few days. It has done much to crush my spirits.
3. Watched Geostorm today. Raised my spirits. Call it evil, but I like bad sci fi. Geostorm is really bad sci fi. In truth, it is bad storytelling overall and that made it even more fun. I was all MST 3K in the theater. I could’ve been teaching my kids bad habits, but who cares?
4. My kids… They legitimately go all gremlin-like after 8 pm. Overtired is a real thing.
5. Haven’t done a pure Some Thoughts in a while and it feels good to get it all down on… online?
6. Back to the kids: They have to wear helmets for NFL redzone 7 on 7 football. Yeah, the NFL overcorrected there.
7. Note from my partner found at my writing desk: Dear Writer, your butt here… I kept the note.
8. It is a strange strange feeling to be so close to the life you want to live and yet so separate from it that it feels like you’re watching it through a window. The problem is, I cannot turn away and I cannot get inside to be a part of that life, so I wind up stuck. Nothing moves forward. Nothing moves at all.
9. Maybe this is the universe’s way of giving me some legitimate heartache to transpose into writing and use to access the writer’sphere where I believe all story comes from.
10. Maybe I’m looking for an excuse why I’m not fully kicking ass as a writer.
11. Maybe I ought to not need one.
12. If garbage in, garbage out is a truism then what I actually need is to purge a great deal of the nonsense I’ve been consuming and fall back into a realm of very good writing and translate that into very productive writing of my own.
13. It isn’t as if there are not stories to be written. There is an entire collection of short stories I want to put out, but I’m not quite there yet.
14. Not quite there yet is the story of my life and I believe that at this mid-life point I am beginning to run out of time.
15. At least I stopped comparing myself to others by age of accomplishment. I have continued to compare to others by overall accomplishment.
16. On the bright side, I sense a narrowing of focus to the things that truly matter most.
17. One of those things… the thing… is the shared happiness between my partner and I. That, of course is the one thing I have the least power to control and the one thing that occupies the most of my energy.
18. The rest falls to the kids and the money issue. That last one is a huge one. The money issue is one that seems to be the crux of my problems. Less money, more problems. You were wrong there, Biggie. Now I gotta get right.

 

Logan Paul filmed a suicide victim in a Japanese forest and then laughed about it. This is the guy my kids watch(ed) every day. This is the youtube stuff I’d decided wasn’t that bad after all. I was so wrong.

That Logan Paul is an asshole isn’t news of surprising in any way. The extent of his assholery is somewhat surprising, but to further his glory on the eyes and minds of my children is practically criminal. In other words, that asshole doesn’t get airtime.

This isn’t an outright ban. I talked to the boys and explained that he and his equally idiotic younger brother represent the worst version of us and should no be promoted to stardom and idolotry. I used slightly smaller language, but the point was immediately clear. When they watched this evening the watched a better caliber of internet ‘hero’ and while that isn’t enough, it is a start.

The internet is a powerful tool that can shape our understanding of the world we live in and in a sense even form it.

Some Thoughts:

1. The 100 is a wonderful idea ruined by a need to cater to a CW audience. The cast and oversexualization of the plotline prove this.
2. B7. It keeps popping up. It matters. Always has.

I’m burnt out. On parenting. On the day to day grind. On transition days. I live in this headspace where I begin the day convinced that I have a bottomless cup of energy and by midday I recognize that I really only had coffee. And disappointment. The sad face side of me is reminded that life is not what we wanted. We didn’t get the poorly formed plan A where I become a sports star and that is the endgame. The B of happy marriage ended in dissolution and a lasting sense of disappointment. The post marriage is not storybook.

In truth, I am just really tired of sinking into life after life and finding each progressive iteration less relatable than the last. They spoil pretty fast. The one thing I am holding onto remains out of reach like that carrot dangling from the end of a stick, and my mule brain scampers forward.

Not the brightest and most endearing blog of my life (or even the year) but I fear that this is where I am at right now and it is going to take time to climb free.

again.

Let’s face it: I’m lazy. Me, the guy who once presumed he could teach any subject if given enough lead time to plan a lesson and learn the stuff he doesn’t know. That guy is lazy. Often the bastion of the lazy is to talk about what they could do if they weren’t lazy. And here we are. It is time to start talking about what I will do and what I will make happen over the next ten months. I’m marking it at ten, because I just suffered through the worst holiday season in my life. I have no intention of making things be that way again.

So, I’ve come up with a few plans. Plan A has me and my partner taking that al important next step together. Plan B has me moving into a temporary lifestyle where I get an apartment or (less likely) a house and downsize my living conditions to the bare minimum in exchange for a stellar location. Plan C has me collecting enough funds (and credit) to put a little down on a house and start a new life in that house for me and my boys.

I’m working for plan A. B and C are what happens when I don’t get the things I want, but they are opportunities to grow into a new life nonetheless. This old life is about done and all that remains is the process of transition–tying up loose ends and letting the kids finish out their sports ‘careers’ out here.

Some Thoughts:

1. Ironically this 187 post also marks the death of my thoughts of moving from my current post. I’ll stay and finish where I’m at.
2. Weird moments in the house all night. I don’t feel like I’m alone. No, I’m not talking about the cat… where is that cat?

A teacher once joked to me, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” I took that phrase to heart, because it resonated. It reminded me that as a teacher students often expect us to know and understand everything–even everything that is affecting their learning. This expectation of knowledge is a double edged sword. On one edge is the empowering feeling of being the sage. On the other edge is the struggle between expectation and reality. See, the most difficult and often embarrassing or even dangerous thing you can do is to assume that you do know everything you can about a situation. That presumption of knowledge is what what led to this failure as an instructor.

In the online teaching environment all a student has to go off of are your instructions and your feedback. While I might feel my language is clear, I am approaching it as the writer–someone who knows exactly what idea he is trying to convey. Students are my audience, but they are such a wide and diverse audience that there is no way to be sure that a message well received by one student will be taken by another the same way. That is why when I suggested that a student use smarthinking, I thought I was directing her to our online tutoring app.

She didn’t.

To make matters worse, she took my feedback as a direct attack on her ability to write. In other words, she thought her teacher was calling her stupid. In a developmental English class, you are often dealing with students who haven’t been encouraged to feel positive about their writing. Once she thought I called her stupid she quietly shut down. She finished the semester, squeaking out a passing grade, but for a long time she was totally turned off to the idea of writing and even took time off before attempting the next level of English composition.

That is how I know what happened. She wound up in my teaching partner’s class and during a conversation with that instructor she explained the situation from her perspective. She talked about how hurt she was and how she, a budding creative writer, had gone completely back into her shell at the thought that an authority figure would trash her ability so openly. Later, with her instructors encouragement, she had a chance to discuss the matter with me, and we straightened the entire mess out. She even signed up for a learning community with myself and my teaching partner.

The thing is, I didn’t know that what I said was taken that way. She was too hurt and shy in the moment to communicate that. As a result I built in a feedback loop to my communications with online students. When I give feedback I make sure they respond to the feedback, explaining what they think I meant. This way there are fewer miscommunications, and I can catch a problem before it does real damage. I was lucky to catch that student before any lasting damage could occur, but I often wonder if anyone else in my past wasn’t so lucky.