Month: May 2018

Change is difficult. When the proponents of that change are not trusted or, as troublesome, the stake holders of that change fear the change will not address their needs or negatively impact them, then the change becomes dangerous. I’ve kept entirely apart from the drama that encircles the community college district where I work. The thing has become political, and by that I mean that it has become a fight to both get attention and control public opinion on the issues involved. The issue is that the college system is changing and in some ways modernizing. How it is changing is what has so many people up in arms because of the issues I highlighted in the opening statement. Faculty feel they have been robbed of their voice and power, administration feel both at risk and as though there is not any legitimate oversight of employee groups. When I read the theme for the international PTK Honors Project, I thought I was staring down the barrel of the work we’ve been doing at the college and others like it for the past few years.

Transformations: Acknowledging, Assessing, and Achieving Change

In essence, the conversation happening at the college level is filtering through the consciousness of a number of groups who recognize that change is coming hard and fast to higher education, but lack any idea of what that change will or should look like. There is also the longstanding belief that change–actual change in action–is pre-governed by the genetically hardwired philosophy of self-preservation. Nobody is going to cut their own job. They’ll cut around it like a gerrymandered voting zone. Therefore any real change is mitigated by the reality of personal need. The people with the power to change will deal with their own needs first. If those needs don’t match what the populous thinks, you get the kind of friction I see each day in my profession. Change hurts.

Absolute change hurts absolutely.

Some Thoughts:

1. When Chris Paul is your leading rebounder you get beat by 40. That’s just the facts, yo.
2. When my kids are not with me I do not generally communicate with my kids. I don’t like that. It makes me feel like a part time person in their lives when I know that not to be the case… Or is it?

I’m listening to rain in the rainforest on a supposedly live feed (which might have been live once but is now clearly recorded and on delay). It is the only form of ASMR I can truly play without the family staring at me and calling me weird. The really good stuff (cat grooming, soft voices, strange ambient noises) labels me as an instant weirdo, so I’m trading basic level tingles for a small bit of personal comfort.

Turns out I need to relax. I’m slowly eating myself into oblivion and everything else is lapsing with the growing bulge of my tummy. Today, the 19th, I decided to give myself until August 19th to finally get my shit together. What that means is I am going to get right on writing and diet and exercise. This in no means is going to be a ‘one day he was dope!’ but instead a process structured and working backwards in time from 8.19 till today when I will certainly start the long climb uphill.

I need to build relaxation into whatever plan I am cooking up. That is a certainty.

Search my text history and you’ll find a slew of texts to myself. I send them to me or to my email with the intention of collecting them, like notes, for future writings. I used to do this with notebooks. I used to carry them around in my bag and jot down ideas throughout the day that sometimes would be read and sometimes the act of writing the note was enough to exorcize the thought. Nowadays I write fewer notes–the texts replacing the notebooks take up both less space and less words entirely. Nowadays my ideas slim to slivers of thought vs the chunks of ideation that made me into a writer.

There must be a way to marry the two worlds. My lands of pen and paper vs. the spoils of modern technology where scrivener is seen as he penultimate pin board of writing vs. that cream colored wall stuck so full of pins and taped pages that it felt like nothing else existed upon that wall.

I’m not sure if I ever effectively made the transition or understood what was necessary to join the two types of planning and writing together. I know that I’ve been less and less productive over the years, and while there are multiple factors, this definitely counts as one of them.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The footballing ended quite suddenly and quietly with a first round tournament exit. That was uninspiring. No tales to be told of a first round loss.

Friday marks the last flag football tournament my eldest will probably play for some time. He’s moving into high school and in addition to trying to play tackle for a well known and ranked team, he’s already looking ahead to a complex slate of freshman classes and even to next summer when he plans to take Spanish (to get it out of the way). It feels like times are changing for all of us. We are moving into different realms of enjoyment and responsibility. I’m happy and excited to watch them grow into men. I am also terrified to see who they become. A lot of who men are is dependent on the things they are exposed to as kids and, as importantly, how they are talked through those events. I don’t know how good I am at such things. I know I could definitely use some work in the communication department as a dad. It is really odd that a dad who is a professional writer is often so trash at talking to his own kids.

In other news, I am taking a few days to get my life in order. Life maintenance, they call it. That work begins this coming week as I prepare for classes…

Yes, that was a joke. I would love to have a moment to do such things, but the way life works for me is more like a California roll than a stop to collect myself. I do know that I’m slowly compiling things to read and watch so that once summer is full upon me I will be able to slip into fantastic worlds and use the excitement of that writing and viewing to create magic of my own.

It is a relief to talk about sports. Maybe that is why people do it so much. Sports is so far removed from my life and I have such a wealth of data that I can successfully chat about sports for hours. In that time I can successfully ignore all of the drama going on in my own life. So, yay sports!

Tonight I caught a glimpse of the Houston Rockets unleashing a beatdown on the Warriors. Good. I’m not a fan of the Warriors. I’m largely past the stacked team hate and more on to the wasting good talent hate as I consider all of the solid players who have been relegated to role players on that squad. I’m talking to you, Klay Thompson! The Rockets won 127-105 and it really wasn’t that close. The late stages of the 4th quarter was largely garbage minutes after the 2nd Q largely determined the outcome.

Meanwhile in the Eastern Conference, the LeBron show is not enough. 2-0 go the Celtics and that is without the help of Kyrie. I’m left to believe that Irving will not be part of the program next year, which gives me such high hopes that he could wind up on the Knicks–a team about to launch into a new offense, and one that could be cut from the 2-player cloth of the Stockton-Malone era.

Some Thoughts:

1. That was slightly cathartic

A common slogan in sports these days is ‘I’m built for this.’ The slogan is meant to indicate one’s specialization and skillset as it applies to a specific task. In other words, you’re born to be that kind of athlete. Sitting here in a workshop for my college I recognize that I am not built for this. In fact, the business side of teaching is absolutely contrary to my personal nature. I’m not one for categorizations (sociology background not withstanding) but I am what you would call a ‘creative’ and a non-linear thinker for the most part. Now that means a lot of different things to different people but for me it means I have a lot of stuff up in the air and I pluck at it with the grace and skill of a juggler…

who happens to be in a low gravity environment.

In plain language, I constantly have a number of projects happening and peck at them all slowly as opposed to focusing my attention on each one to its completion then moving on to the next. I also almost never write out the guidelines and rubrics (in essence the after action report) of what I just did. I just don’t roll like that. I don’t like it and I don’t feel it works terribly well for my brain or especially my time. In essence, I do not care about such things.

Such things are the backbone of teaching and absolutely aren’t me.

The TV show Atlanta reminds me of what life would’ve been like if people had been slightly crazier than it was. Dj Khalid reminds me of what life actually is like for people who are seen as scions of the culture (if only by those outside of the culture). I’m learning that everything is spectrum.

Some Thoughts:

1. Still have not fixed the site. It is low on the priority list right now.
2. Cavs got blown out game 1. We will discuss this more Wednesday.
3. Warriors put in work as well… (see above)
4. Late nights are really not working out for me with the writing. I find myself struggling to put together words in a coherent way at any length. So the blogs get shorter and shorter and about less. I expect to blog earlier tomorrow.
5. And more coherently to boot.

As a great believer in speculative fiction I find it astoundingly interesting that the human population only reached a billion people in 1804. It took about a hundred years to hit the next billion. It took 30 years to get the next billion and… 14 more to get the next billion. Between 1804 and 2018 we jumped to 7.8 billion people on this planet. Yet we are slowing down. We are moving from the maddening 2% growth rate of the 60’s to 1.09% growth rate of 2018. This has some analysts thinking that we are in continuing decline as a species. It suggests that we are shifting towards the baseline .25% rate of the early evolution of man. This theory does not, however, speak to what is going to happen once we get there. What if the cycle of humanity is one that continues to turn. What if once we bottom out again, we breed at a high level? What are the conditions that, sociologically, would allow that? When I consider writing deep science fiction novels, those are the sorts of things I am looking at.

In this specific context I am thinking of space exploration. The numbers we are at right now don’t really make us uncomfortable. In places like Bangladesh where population density is 1,278 people per sq kilometer, the idea of space is a constant. However, even in India the p/km2 is only 455. China is 151. Both are large enough and have the size of population to be fairly comfortable with this. In contrast, the p/km2 for New York City is 11,000. Imagine if that was everywhere. 

We would be desperate to get off this planet. However, we are not. In the United States we are absolutely not. Instead with our number at 36 we’ve gone in a different direction. We have gotten so used to having a ton of space we are now trying to prevent more people from coming in and upsetting the balance. Yet here they come-to the tune of 900,000 a year. We are still in the Qin Dynasty stages of building walls vs. rockets. We still see this planet and our personal space as something that can be maintained.

What if we didn’t? And it is here that speculative fiction begins.

I spent part of my evening listening to a conversation between Barrack Obama and Dave Letterman. I was reminded throughout how different it feels to have a President who is in that role because he about his country and not because he is about himself. I’m not making a move to relitigate the election. Instead I am reflecting on the demeanor and the very nature of the men in power.

We are in many ways a reflection of those who lead us. We are a reflection of those we see as the seat of power. We try to emulate these interesting people and as a result we become a form of them and they of us. This is why I have such grave concerns about what is very quickly happening to us under the present administration.

This is not only a fear, but this is a strange certainty where I know that the situation is bound to get far worse before it gets any better. It is an absolute struggle and I struggle with knowing my personal role in all of this.

 

This is a celebration week. I’m celebrating the bday of one of my franchise boys. While he is not getting a super-sized party and gift situation, he is getting a special gift in the form of my old iphone 6 plus, and I am delivering it in a cinematic way. I’ve staged a series of balloons leading from his room to our largest beyblade stadium where it waits surrounded by balloons and buried beneath his favorite candies and a batman. Often the delivery is what makes a thing special.

I intend to celebrate with a special meal and a good amount of pool time. I’m learning more and more that the things that matter are the things that help the people I love to be happy. That in turn furthers my own happiness. Call it selfish, but only in a good way.

Some Thoughts:

1. Working on a half dozen projects right now and I am super excited about all of them.
2. Looking forward to a wonderful mother’s day with the woman I love.
3. A lot of positive stuff happening in my current reality. All I am missing is sleep.