Month: January 2024

My office is starting to get that cluttered feel again. This happens a few weeks into the semester, after I’ve spent time getting it looking all nice and putting everything away… somewhere. Then, needing to locate all that stuff or generate new stuff, I immediately create these piles of papers that I tell myself I am going to get to. I will, but of course that will happen just before the next semester when I am cleaning up again. It’s a vicious cycle. I’m not saying I don’t take pride in the cleanliness. I’m saying I cannot maintain that and still be on the grind. The grind, you see, is dirty. I stay grinding, so my office(s) stay dirty.

Feels like the world of writing makes a lot more sense when I approach it with that gangster mentality. This ought to be how I think and act moving forward. Writing is gangster when you really think about it. We are out here selling stories about experiences people don’t really wanna have themselves but wanna hope and dream about. What’s more gangster than that?

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m kinda kidding about the gangster thing… but not really.

Writing first thing in the morning is a wonderful feeling. Ideally, I want to be diving headfirst into fiction long before the sun comes up. There are a few problems with this, however. To begin with, I hate waking up. I set the alarm for 5:00 and didn’t get up till well past 5:30. It is still dark and I am still here at my desk typing away, but man it took a while to get going. Still, this is the way. When I did the reset and added up all of the things I needed to be doing in order to promote a successful and healthy lifestyle, I found that I was going to be working a six hour day… that doesn’t include my day job. This is not what I would call ‘actionable intelligence’. Which brings me to the second hurdle to morning writing: I have too much going on.

Sure, I am finding time to do fiction, but I also checked and responded to work emails, because I teach in a few hours. I love the teaching, but I am having a hard time compartmentalizing the things I need to do, most likely because there are far too many things that I need to do over the span of a day. Once I read about a method where you divide up your day into one hundred or so squares/blocks of time and in that time you are supposed to mark off all of the stuff that populates your day and your life. What became clear to me upon discovering this method is that I tend to have a lot of stuff, and most of it involves dealing with other people’s stuff. Being a dad remains a full time gig–even in a half time situation. Mentally, I am still there well into the week they are not here. What changes is how much time I spend making sure they get from point A to point B relatively on time. Beyond that I remain disorganized in the teaching sense. I’m a tinkerer and always tinkering with the content and the content delivery, which leads to me cramming new information into powerpoints hours before class. This too subtracts (detracts?) from the writing.

I suppose the bottom line here is that I’m pulled between a handful of core things in my life, and it is tough to lock into a schedule that allows proper time for everything that needs to be done. What I think will work best is if I continue waking up bloody early and devoting a good chunk of that pre-dawn darkness to the work. Perhaps I’ll even cruise over to youtube, flip on a slick background feed like ambient renders, and upload my mind into a story. That is what I want life to look like for me in the wee hours. This way, by the heart of the afternoon I can be out in the streets or in the woods with the woman I love. Maybe I’ll even get in a game or three in the early evening. That sounds like a perfect life to me.

Over the past few weeks I developed a weekly calendar, or more appropriately, a weekly checklist. The idea behind this concept is to create a list of things I need to do on a daily basis and continue growing in the process of deliberate practice. That term, which I borrow from Buddhism, means that I am mindful of these actions/activities and develop them into a routine that is the defining element of my life. Where I went wrong in this list is the heavy focus on work and self. Nowhere in this list of 12 is there a nod to developing routines with my partner or focusing on having meaningful conversations about where she is in her life. I think this is important to note, because while I don’t see myself as a selfish and self-centered individual, my actions and deliberate habits reveal me.

I am rewriting my daily. I am restructuring what I deliberately practice to reflect not only who I am and where I am but who I want to be and who I wish to ultimately become on this journey of self-improvement. Even the statement itself seems selfish until I reflect on why I am becoming more than what I am. The reason behind all of this is to become better for the people around me. If I am being 100% honest with myself, the easiest thing in life to do would be to sit in this bat-chair and zone out on internet material or bad TV until it was time to write something and then zone out on that until it is time to play some games and then zone out on that until I pass out. I find that when left to my own devices for too long, that is what happens. My motivations are limited. My larger motivations are an amalgam of what I want and what she wants and what I want generally leans towards making her happy and thus being happy myself.

I don’t know what the rewrite looks like. I know that I am ready to get to work.

One of those nights where my mind wanders and I fall directly into…

Some Thoughts:

1. Brock Purdy is basic. Serviceable. Not in the Lamar/Mahomes/Allen conversation. Not in the Stroud conversation. Just basic. Good in the system. Won’t win the game all alone. That being said, the Brock Purdy love is out of control. I saw Lets Go Brock signs all over the highway today… I’m in his home state, which is NOT the state of the team he plays for.
2. I am waiting for the first car accident to be caused by an Apple Vision User. The breakthrough device moves beyond the shielded vision of the Meta Systems to a system you can likely use while walking around. Spatial computing, AR, the ability to use hand gestures… yeah this thing is cooking.
3. Been watching a TON of creepy videos online. I am not really sure why. It feels like I am either preparing for something or putting my mind in a state for… lord knows why? One thing I found sad and curious is how many people post videos of situations where they witness something possibly terrible happening to a person (usually female) and do nothing. What is wrong with people anymore?
4. Speaking of which, Vince McMahon finally got nabbed for his shady behaviors. I feel for the women who suffered at his hands, and I hope they get the justice they very much deserve.
5. Meanwhile, the Rock is now running the WWE. This man is killing it.
6. Well, we are nearing the ten mark, so all I can say is happy Saturday. Be good to yourselves. Be good to the people you love.

Yes, I said I was going back to fiction… No, I don’t have it in me today.

What has me going on empty is the increasing amount of work I find I have to do in order to retcon things after not doing the work in the beginning of the process to make sure these things are set in stone and make sense the way I want them to make sense to the reader. In other words, my lore is jacked and I need to fix that. What I’ve decided to do is spend a little more time each day developing the lore for the stories I am working on. I feel like this patient development is the best approach. Meanwhile I am already far enough down the road on my novel series that retcon is the way to go here. Well, more specifically I am going to make it all make sense and dig deeper into the lore of these characters, so in the 3rd (and final???) book in the series they are reaching the point where their backstories are fully revealed.

Some Thoughts:

1. Took a writing reset day yesterday. Blog was all I was able to deal with.

Let me start with the number: 238. Given that it is January 25th, my expected weight is 232, following a two pounds per week plan and following a 234 reading last week. Now I am moving in the wrong direction. I get it. I’ve had some emotional relapses. I’ve eaten more meat than I should be eating in a month in a week, I haven’t worked out at all. If you put it all together, I absolutely deserve the reading I earned.

So, the work begins anew.

My life is series of attempts, fails, restarts, and successes. I don’t win much, and that makes the wins feel all the better. I am one of those people who wishes he could go back in time and clean up a bunch of things personally. I cannot do that. All I can do is try to be the best me tomorrow, and be the best version of myself for myself and for the people I care about around me. I have not done that this past week. For the past week and a half I have engaged in epic failure. I need to acknowledge that, own it, and analyze it in order to move forward and be better.

So, I failed. What happens next?

I gotta come up with a more rigid plan. I need to realize what works and figure the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations required to follow through with the plan. Above all else, I need to feel like I am moving forward and being successful at this. It felt good to move forward. Moving backwards sucks.

Let’s start off with a brief nod to Lamar Jackson. The much-maligned quarterback is fighting through a who lot of stereotyping (and borderline institutional racism) to become the guy who not only gets to the show, but wins the MVP. We exist in a world of comparisons, and unfortunately those comps tend to fall squarely along racial lines in the world of the NFL. The handful of articles I’ve read espousing these comps exist behind paywalls, so no links here. However, it is clear that the new crop of QBs for the 2024 draft are being given floors and ceilings compared to other QBs “like them” which basically means race. Take Jayden Daniels for example. His ceiling is the aforementioned Lamar Jackson. His floor is Tyrod Taylor, according to more than one article. However, if you really watch these players, Tyrod Taylor and Lamar don’t have similar games. Taylor has the ability to extend a play but he doesn’t have the same type of game as Jackson or Daniels. Feels like race plays a larger role than game here.

Back to Lamar and the Ravens. Dang, man. This team gives me vibes. I’ve been a Giants fan my entire life and I’m getting 2001 vibes when my G-Men caught a beating from a dominant Ravens team. Also feeling the 2013 rematch of the HarBowl minus one Har-Bro. Interesting if dude wins again the same year his bro is contemplating an NFL return.

The Chiefs? Oh they are very good. They have a great D and a QB who has that dog in him.. and no Wrs. So… Yeah.

I want to share two quotes from a past blog. I’m going back to 1426, which was published April 1st, 2014. Not your typical April Fool’s stuff, but it had a few things in there I think resonate for me even now.

This story is about understanding something I’ve only recently realized: Opportunities arrive throughout life. There is nothing that says we are hopeless and ruined if things don’t happen for us right away.

Talislegger 1426

This first quote (note: I figured out how to use quotes in this thing!) hits me now in a way that reminds me that I still possess patience. 2014 was a tough year on a number of levels. I won’t go into those details, but I was struggling with relationships and being a dad and trying to be a good teacher and a good coach and really shifting my focus to the things I felt I could control. Every once in a while a light would turn on and remind me that I still have people who respect and even appreciate my work. I still work for those people a decade later, producing solid fiction.

The job of a teacher cannot merely be to deliver content. A book can do that. The job of a teacher is to help the student interpret and apply content to their specific situation first and to a global perspective secondarily.

Talislegger 1426

I teach three days a week in person this semester and each class is severely different than the one that came before it. I stopped using textbooks. I don’t see the value in them just reading content and not being guided to understanding by me. I teach creative writing and english and game studies and mythology. I don’t teach memorization fields like science or the social sciences where the textbook is extremely needed. I try to turn my space into an enjoyable and memorable experience where the content is learned because they are engaged and want to learn en route to being successful.

Well, we know Sunday sucked.

Monday wasn’t a ton better, but I approached it with a ‘I got this’ attitude and it helped me power through a pair of very long classes that I am not sure I was 100% for. The second was better than the first. The first suffered from technical issues and an extremely flat crowd. I do have some stars in that group, so that is a bonus. The second saw me short on content and generally not as up and ready as I intend to be on a regular basis. Tomorrow is a new day… one that finds me less prepared for interaction than hoped… again. So, I will brighten my new morning with the work of preparing classes and power points and delving a bit deeper into this concept of gamification.

I ought to gamify that Monday/Wednesday class. There is certainly time enough to create some bright moments of fun with that. I’ll give it more thought over the course of the week as my mind moves back into resolution. Presently I feel anything but resolute or ready for the world. I am ready to fall into several hours of video games and bad tv. I am ready to tuck myself away from the world and veg out. I am not ready to be a better me like I’ve promised. I am ready in most ways for the task, but I am still so very tired and run down and not wanting to engage.

Maybe I’ll give myself the night.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been playing more pokemon TCG online and learning that there are ways to be really good… you gotta have a deck that gets built out fast.
2. Lots to say about sports, politics, and more. But not more today….

This was not one of the good days. I’d like to argue I have more good days than bad, but even the best days don’t take away from how bad it gets when it is bad. Today was a rough one from a familial standpoint. I took hit after hit and really had to recognize the place I have in the lives of the people around me, what I am doing to make their lives better or worse, and the impact my actions have overall. I say this as a person who, in essence, is juggling two lives that truly ought to feel like one but don’t. I have my kids half the time, so half my life is lived in a fashion quite different from the other half of my life. While my older step-kids live with us, they don’t shift the landscape of how I live my life. School age children do that in a way that older kids cannot.

So, I struggle with the constant shift and struggle with the expectations during and between those shifts. Today was part of that struggle in ways I really don’t know how to explain. Needless to say I created a large amount of pain and drama based on parental choices that were mine alone and done without the consent of my partner, who is their stepmom and my best friend. Except I haven’t been acting like much of a friend. I haven’t been acting like much beyond a selfish person who doesn’t seem to know who is on his side or why there needs to be sides at all. Instead I behave that there are sides, and I am the only one on mine all the time. This isn’t how it actually is, but it is how I feel more days than I should. I don’t know how to fix that fundamental problem. I don’t know how to feel like I am on a team where I am supported. I spent my entire first marriage being on a team where I wasn’t supported and was raised in a household where I was constantly treated as less-than and the problem, so while that is no excuse, it is an explanation of why such an old habit continues to rear it’s ugly head.

I don’t know how to make things right, and I keep making things worse. For as much as I call myself a good writer, I am a bad communicator. That, is why today is a bad day.