Day: November 2, 2020

It is just before six am and I find myself scrambling to put together my classes for the week. I’m doing a lot of redesign and rebuilding this year and teaching different versions of the same class online, which involves more shuffling than I thought possible. In addition I’ve assigned more work than before–more work at my 100 and 200 level classes than in my 300 level classes. This is a pattern that probably needs to change in the future as well. However, here we are.

So, I am scrambling. I am trying to grade enough work this morning to be able to post the new stuff for, well, this morning. This is not the position I crave to be in, but it is the one I chose to be in by taking the last week basically off. As I’ve chronicled, the recent emotional journey has been a tortured one. I have not been on my A game in any way shape or form. Last night I woke up less than an hour after falling asleep and I told myself, “that is it. You need to get your crap together now.” I managed to get back to bed instead of staying up all night as I’ve been doing under these circumstances. It was a brief and poignant moment of self control that led me to be up pre-dawn and deciding that I was going to get on top of this mountain of madness that is my life.

Or maybe I just recognize that I’m in the sprint phase and I’m one hell of a sprinter. Either way, I am ready to work extremely hard and get things done.

Some Thoughts:

1. More on that sprinting vs. pacing philosophy at a later date… I need to think on that one.
2. Very disappointed in the youth football stuff, as I have explained before. What sucks even more is that the season is going to be ending for our team in the next two weeks. We are starting playoffs and given our record showing 1 loss, we will likely end up playing the team we lost to in the 2nd round and we haven’t gotten any better. If anything we got worse. We lost our QB and our #2 is decent, but she isn’t ready for a team that brings that much pressure. Moreover, our run game has not done a thing this season and we are still starting the wrong kid.

The election is in a few short days and I believe we are going to have a new president. I also believe the damage has already been done to the morale and credibility of the American people. Cynicism is the new normal, and the media manipulations, both of our own doing and as a result of foreign actors, are so severe that this idea of truth has all but vanished. Moreover, there is a growing sense that representation is becoming increasingly unbalanced and outsized. This is true or half (or greater) of the American people are MAGA people and truly in line with the old school philosophies of the present administration. How this can be true is beyond me. If this really was how our country felt then we would never have seen an Obama presidency. It feels more likely that this idea of hope truly floats and what people are hoping for is not uniform. Many Trumpers really want an America that is fundamentally distant from who we were at the end of the Obama presidency and, it seems, reminiscent of the Reagan years. However, time doesn’t move backwards–not in our understanding of the phenomenon at least. You cannot go back. Only forward.

Make America Great Again is a backwards philosophy that argues we were not great at the end of that era. However, we rose out of the housing depression stronger and with a better control on our debt than ever. Unfortunately, this new era has pushed us backwards in that way as well.

The blame, of course, will fall on the democrats (I refuse the use the diminutive ‘dems’ term) and this self-destructive binary reality will continue to tear us apart.