Day: November 23, 2023

Family means so much to me. I really feel like it is important to raise my kids and move them forward and towards their own goals and destinies outside of the nest. This is, of course, why I am so frustrated by the two who aren’t likely to leave the coop before I do. I’m thinking about the next step. I’m thinking about what life looks like when I am not in Arizona and not teaching and not living this specific existence. I am working on changing that existence on a day to day basis and I plan to take even larger steps once the semester ends. I want to be a writer–more than I am right now. I want to do as I did this summer and languish in coffee shops creating fiction and writing wonderful tales. It is about learning and deciding what is important in your life.

So much of my life has been centered on football and kids. I tried to shape an identity around those things. I enjoyed being a coach and I was starting to develop a deeper understanding of the X and Y side of it when I stepped away. I’ve failed to translate this to anything else. I thought I ought to translate it to teaching but it never developed the way it should.

Some Thoughts:

1. Stopping it short there, because I wanted to add a thought about tomorrow. It is Thanksgiving and I (might) be playing basketball for the first time in a year at least. I haven’t run in a year. I haven’t done anything strenuous to that level. It feels dangerous. Not trying to have a heart attack, but we will see what shakes out.

I am writing this on a word doc in order to be published at a later date. The issue is terribly slow web response to the server. I cannot explain it, but I do admit it had happened in the past. Sometimes the server is just junk. Fortunately, the junkiness of the server is not the point of tonight’s post. I want to talk about the Hunger Games

Specifically I want to talk about the movie I just watched—A Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds (I may have that order backwards but I don’t much care enough to check). It was a movie that, based on what I hear from my partner, did not do justice to the book. Honestly, I could tell you that without her firsthand knowledge of the written version. There were far too many moments that seemed to cut away from what was deep story and relationship building in exchange for drawn out moments of near touching and a high level of focus on the violence. Several characters in the game portion were reduced to utter stereotypes (See: Reaper, the black powerhouse). That didn’t improve the narrative.

Despite these moments it was still enjoyable and held on to enough of the book narrative to be a good story… until the end. That wasn’t so good in my opinion.