10 Minute Rule

When things erupt in my life they rarely do so quietly. Instead it is as if everything in my history was waiting for this moment to explode. This weekend it finally did. What started as a relatively banal parenting situation quickly spiraled into what I would describe as a game changer. Short version: My kid lied to me about where he was. I told him to come home. He told me no and decided to go to his mom’s house instead. We haven’t spoken since.

There is a lot to break down there, but the game changer is his refusal to listen and ability to retreat to another parent who does not discipline or agree that what he did was even wrong. It is very tough to parent a kid who lives between parents. It is especially tough when one of those parents isn’t willing to work with the other and uses anything they can to further endear herself with the child. The weaponization of children is a terrible thing, but one I’ve long been used to. My children have been riding those waves for over a decade. This is not the first time it has been a situation where one ran to the other parent because they knew there were no consequences on that side. However, that kid was over 18 at the time. This one isn’t.

So, what comes next? I don’t know. I want to believe the relationship with the kid is repairable. I don’t know that it is. He’s at that age where lying and manipulation come easy. Worse still, he’s surrounding himself with people who thrive on such things and are not willing to hold him accountable for anything. Instead any perception of him being in the wrong or any perceived failure is blamed on external sources. Even in the moment this weekend his refusing to come home was labeled as ‘my fault’. This is a recipe for failure. What does he think is going to happen when he gets to college? Does he expect these same ploys to work? My best guess is that he washes out as a freshman and returns to his mom where he will continue to be coddled well into his adulthood, because that gives her purpose and value. Some people are willing to sacrifice their kids future to feel good about themselves. I’m not the one.

So, what does that mean I do? I don’t know. I’m not sure how to fight this battle and teach him to stand up and stand alone. I am running out of time to figure that out.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Hungarian election winner Magyar vows to fight graft, change constitution” for context, Orban provided the framework for the gerrymandering and other steps towards legally rigging elections. He stacked the deck so heavily in his favor that in spite of overwhelming numbers of people hating him and his politics, he stayed in power for 16 years. Just recently JD Vance campaigned for the man, on our tax dollars. He still lost. This is going to ripple across the world. Hopefully the wave hits us in the next presidential election, because if it doesn’t we’re done for as a positive global influence.

I was going to do a dad blog, but I decided to wait on that one until this presently occuring dad situation unfolds to completion. Instead, I figured I’d leap right into…

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “JUST IN: Trump says the US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz will be ‘all or none,’ with no passage for any ship until Iran relents.” To share a later quote, “I don’t understand how blockading the strait is going to somehow push the Iranians into opening it. I don’t get the connection there,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. So now we are the ones blocking the strait because they’ve decided to toll people going through, and we won’t let what we describe as a terrorist organization toll their own space? This is getting so dramatically out of control that I no longer expect a peaceful resolution in my children’s lifetimes. I mean how much damage can we do to our world reputation in four years?!
2. Meanwhile, we are about to host the World Cup in the worst possible political climate for such things. I fear for the fans, honestly. That is if the ones we consider “undesirable” even get let in.
3. I don’t like the way things are going and the level of existential stress it is causing me as a human. It feels like this administration is resetting us to a time when we all had to consider the constant threat of global nuclear war. However, there are so many more threats at play now with the way we’ve handled technology. Oh to be able to go back to a time where it wasn’t like this!
4. Then this happened: “Israeli strike kills infant girl in south Lebanon during father’s funeral” Which brings me back to the root cause of much of this. I don’t deny Israel’s ability to protect themselves, but what we are seeing here is another example of hardliners silencing the masses and creating conditions to both keep themselves in power and carry out their life-long missions of not only destroying other cultures that threaten, but expanding their own footprint. Israel doesn’t care about societies that are not as wealthy or globally appreciated as they are and man, it is showing here.
5. Then there is this: “In February, Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a report that said the deportation agreements with foreign governments cost American taxpayers millions ?of ?dollars – at times more than $1 million per ?person shipped out of the country – and produce little benefit.”
6. Well, that’s our stem of reality. It could be worse. It could also be quite a bit better…

“It’s International Fact-Checking Day. Refresh your AI identification skills” When I first started using computers back in the early 90’s we still used the terminology Mega Instructions per Second, or MIPS. A publicly available computer could run at 10 to maybe 35 MIPS. We don’t even use the terminology anymore because it reflects an architecture that is too slow and outdated. In other words, start adding zeros. The average laptop is 50,000 times faster and more capable than the computers I grew up with. Yes, we used to believe that Moore’s law would show that we’re gonna peak, but that law was proved false four years ago, and we’ve made huge jumps in processing since then.

All of this is to say that we are moving into the AI era, and it is going to be a lot like the massive jumps in technology experienced during my childhood. Where I was accessing amazing new visuals and realizing that Basic was not the end all to coding, we are starting to witness self-replicating code and technology that evolves to meet the expectations of its audience. The worst part of it–or the scariest–is that we are not ready as a mature and intelligent species. At least not here in the USA, and probably not in a lot of areas of the world.

AI is a tool, but the problem with tools in our culture is that we become reliant upon them and fail to both mentally safeguard ourselves against the effects (pay close attention to chatbots), nor are we aware enough to understand (or even want to?) how they work. This scares me on a few levels. Mainly, we are putting these tools in control of functions that shape our lives. We know already that power corrupts. Why do we continue to fail to respect that axiom?

Andon Market in San Fransisco tried to let the tool take control. The company is, “preparing for a future in which organizations are run by autonomous AI systems, or agents, like Luna.” It hired its own employees through Luna AI, an open source ai bot matrix. It did all of the things a business should do. It also did more. Read the article. Sounds mundane. Winds up not being. This is only the beginning.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Ichiro Suzuki’s statue unveiling has a mishap as bat snaps during ceremony”

I think….

We’d be much better off in some senses had we elected Harris. We’d be far more visibly divided, because the half that controls the media is the half that pushes the divisiveness the most. Of course, that just kicks this exploding can down the road. Now we are in the space where the can exploded, as did our modern reality. Gaslighting is only partially working and while the world sees us for who we actually are based on this minority, the majority still is not powerful enough to shange the tide. At least now we see how hard the minority is working against majority rule.

I think…

The upcoming football season is going to be a hot mess at every single level. This is partially a result of political involvement and partially a result of the hyper-fascination and media scrutiny of everything at every level. I’m no better. I love the sport and I tend to dig my heels in at every opportunity to get more data.

I think….

I miss Madden. I miss using Madden and college as an educational tool to keep up with the game and how it is played. I want to make my time playing omre meaningful and become a more intelligent gamer.

I think….

I talk and think about sports a lot. It makes sense, because this is the entirety of how my kids operate in this lovely world. I should’ve been a sports writer. That would at least give me free access to PFF… wait… I am a sportswriter! Imma go get that again.

I think…

I love this thoughts setup. It reminds me of the old school ten things I think I think and it’s lovely cofeenerdness. I miss that.

I think…

I screwed up numbering horribly over the past week or more. Somehow the numbering slipped back into iteration 3… That is not how it should be and I am going to fix it. Now, actually.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “‘I am thinking about it,’ Kamala Harris says of 2028 presidential bid” Girl, no.

One of the hardest aspects of being a father is letting go. I mean letting go of expectations and letting go of the belief that your kids are going to do for you as you’ve done for them. It isn’t real. It happens at times, but it is not a thing to expect or demand. This recently came up as my youngest is about to go to prom. Here’s some background: He’s the result of the first marriage and spends half the year with his birth mom. Now he wants to get ready for prom there as he always does with these type events. I told him it would me a lot if he got ready here with us. He said it made him feel guilty and I ultimately left it to him to decide.

I already know the decision. He’s not doing it here. So, as a dad I can force the issue or I can let it go. I’m going to choose the latter, because I don’t want to have something that is false. I don’t want to force someone to be somewhere they don’t want to be and make a thing what it is certainly not. It’s fine… in the sense of meme fine.

There are degrees of fine. This is the kind of fine that hurts and you don’t forget–the kind that helps you to reevaluate a relationship. I’m still the dad. I’m still the grown up. Yet now I have a clear sense of where things are at. That helps to put my mind at ease. Nice to know where you stand with people. Even if it is at the back of the line.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Melania Trump holds extraordinary White House event to deny ties to Epstein, knowledge of his crimes” Well, that was… unprompted. Also, the word extraordinary is doing a lot of work there.
2. Also this: “Justice Department is investigating the NFL for potential anticompetitive practices, AP source says” Spoiler: it is about who gets the broadcast games…

I’ve been keeping a watch on Rich Obert’s list of the top 150 AZ football players of 2027. It is a big list–ballooning, even. Still in spite of all that my kid has never made the list. I paid the minimal fee for a short-lived membership to the paper just to see if the kid made it. The list is now up to 30, and no sign of the kid. No clue how the list is chosen either. If it is about players who are getting noticed by colleges, well he ought to be on it with 4 offers, one from a CFP playoff team. If it is about all district honors, he has those as well. We’re only at 30, and sure, I’ll accept the kid isn’t top 30 (though he’s being overshadowed already by lesser players at his position), but I’m expecting to see him in the next 120. If I don’t then it is clearly underdog season loading.

Finally got a clear look at the schedule. The football schedules are largely two-year affairs. You book most of your opponents on a home and home two year deal. Some games are open, giving the team a chance to add a new opponent. This year that opponent is Sandra Day O’Connor High. Good school. My boy played with their 7 on 7 team for a while, so he knows what he is facing. Should be a close match. The rest of the matches don’t quite follow the home and home feel. The last two games are road games against Nogales (at the very edge of the USA) and Corona who features #23 on the aforementioned list, a kid my boy grew up with and who I coached his entire youth career. That too is going to be a fun one.

I want to get into breaking down the rest of it next Wednesday as the Waiver Wire returns in full. For now, I’ll fade into…

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Vance hits out at ‘scandalous’ Zelenskiy comments about Hungary’s Orban” I dislike JD Vance and every single thing this man stands for. I won’t begrudge his wife at all, because I don’t know her, but I can tell you that her man’s ‘white victimhood’ is an absolute sham. He’s not the worst part of that entire administration, but he’s possibly the most insidious among them.
2. 400. That is a big number. I fail to understand why it means more to me than 309 or 402 or anything like that but this threshold number matters, if only a little bit. Let’s keep it rolling.

It works!

As an organization and cueing tool, creating tabs for each assignment is very effective. The secret lies in focus and having a second window open for research. Focus really means closing tabs–especially research ones–when you are done. If you start to leave these things to linger so will your attention. I’ve learned this the hard way by now. I lost focus once during the entire exercise and it cost me at least 30 minutes. Once I got back on track, the work went smoothly. It continues smoothly into day two of this process. I love that learning new things and methods can increase my productivity. I feel like the act of being productive is rewarding, even if I am not a huge fan of the tasks I need to complete.

Finishing is finishing.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “U.K. Bars Ye Over Antisemitism, Months Before Major Festival Performances” UK don’t play. Still, this concept itself strikes me as odd. If you hate Muslims, Christians, or any other religion it is referred to as a phobia. If you feel the same way towards Jewish people it has another term entirely. Though developed in the 1770’s, it was popularly coined back in 1879 by a German journalist, Wilhelm Marr as a rebrand of Jew hate, or Judenhass. Odd though, it was meant to cover multiple peoples, but has only ever applied to the Jewish people. We need to think about how we talk and think about the Jewish people…
2. We also need to think about our own pride. It really feels like everything we are experiencing in the USA right now is a reflection of pride and stems from a sense of arrogance. When you mix those two together you create a sense of exceptionalism that alienates everyone around you because you see yourself as better and not beholden to the rules of the world. For example, our country is about to commit war crimes, if the announced plans of the administration is to be believed. Yet, since we are Americans, it is not a war crime but merely an act of self-defense against a perceived enemy in order to prevent…. economic… threat. Or, as realists perceive, to keep the individuals in power from looking bad.
3. Sigh.
4. I’m going back to my tabs now. Call me when the crazy is over, okay?

I am always on the hunt for new approaches to figuring out how to get stuff done. This method is one that I’ve never ‘officially’ tried and now feel like I’ve been doing in some form for years. I always leave tabs open with work I am attending to. I often leave a tab open for each class and others for emails I need to write, etc. This is done absently as opposed to mindfully. I don’t do it as a way to organize workflow.

But what if I did?

Could the secret to visualizing and thus managing my workflow be as simple as creating a series of tabs or windows that reflect the jobs that need to be done on any given day. Could I find a way to systemize and thus prioritize workflow in a tabular fashion? It doesn’t sound like a huge leap in thinking, but it definitely works as an evolution to the earlier sticky note approach. I could even take the extra moment to correlate sticky notes to tabs as a reinforcement and a bit of a visual reward as the stickies pile starts to fill up. The key to doing this would be having two windows open. One is a research window whose tabs are restricted to research for the current project. The other would be the tab-based window where the work is organized in some fashion (urgency based?). I would complete a tab, take a break, repeat. Add on the visual throwing away of stickies into the task jar and you have a reinforced system!

I’m going to go try this. Tomorrow I will let you know how it went.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Savannah Guthrie returns to ‘Today’ anchor desk for first time since mother’s disappearance” I get that she needs to work. What is bonkers is how much of a story the ongoing disappearance of her mother actually is. That means that whatever she says as one of the key faces of the morning news and show cycle, everyone will be still thinking about how she is doing. It also means there will be no real mention of that case on her show, because that would be sad.
2. Has anyone really paused to consider the fact that regardless of whether or not we decide to “end” the fight in Iran, Israel has vowed to keep bombing them until all the leadership is dead? Given that, when does the fighting actually end? See, you cannot kill every single bit of leadership, because there are always going to be new leaders. It feels like they are trying to slay a belief system, which is going to mean killing a lot more people than just leadership. You have to eliminate all of the followers and acolytes of said leadership as well until they don’t have access to power. That simply isn’t feasible. Has the Gaza Strip taught us nothing?

so, yeah, we did Easter. It was actually quite fun and engaging. The only issue is that I forgot to blog, so here I am on my phone late into the night trying to figure out what to say. I don’t have a solid coherent thought. So, I suppose I’ll get right into…

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Trump issues an expletive-filled threat against Iran as details of US aviator’s rescue emerge” This is getting straight up dumb now.
   
2. Staying on politics for a minute. What really bugs me is the contrast of ideas and how much people within that small but powerful republican base are willing to bend the knee and swallow any sense of decency to get their crap passed. Moreover, people outside of that base are doing the same. It is a toxic situation that the next Democratic administration is going to have to clean up. Why? Because that’s what democrats do anymore. They clean up after the frat party.
   
3. I really try not to be political here all the time but all the time it’s becoming clearer that this crap needs to change and people don’t have a ton of hope that it will. That’s a real problem for me. I’d love to walk away, but my kids won’t and I want to be able to be a part of their lives…
4. Struggling with fatherhood again, obviously. I hate feeling like I’m the forgotten parent.
   
5. on a brighter note I’m feeling much better about the writing, though I am clearly not going to get paid for past work. I don’t know why the company is screwing me like this. I intend to finish out these next few projects and move on. Time to see what I can do with an agent and a good story.
   

Today a man asked me for help. I didn’t wait to see what he needed. Instead I told him I didn’t have any cash. This is not a new occurrence in my life, but this older black man stayed with me all day. I could have been him. I could become him at some point in my life. Nothing is guaranteed, and the protections we’ve long relied upon as Americans are eroding before our eyes. I mean, how can you ignore the grift when Trump’s Presidential library is actually being planned as a high rise hotel? I won’t say more negative things about dear leader, because bots are scraping the internet looking for low-level fools like me to make an example of. Sad how it’s come to that. Sad how when I had a moment to do something different, I did not. I did not go out of my way to make a brighter day for a person in need, so what does that say about who I am?

It doesn’t say anything good. I think who we are is who we are when people are not watching us. I wasn’t being watched then and I turned in a dog of a performance as a human. I need to get better.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “A professional cornhole player and quadruple amputee is arrested for murder” Just read it. It will not disappoint. This suspect wanted to be “a priest or a Secret Service agent one day.” Given his proclivities, he might want to settle for ICE agent.
2. Fun fact: A handful of the players who made Drake a top school over the last two years have transferred to Northern Iowa. UNI plays Drake this season. Should be fun. Might need to watch that one live.