10 Minute Rule

This is the first part of a multi part draft—my first (and only) of 2019. I’ve been conducting research daily to figure out who my team might take and by default learning the needs of the other teams. So here we go.

1 Cardinals: Nick Bosa

The cards are tied to the kyler Murray pick by the media but what makes sense is a strong 4-3 edge rusher to give the defense some life

2 49rs Ed Oliver

While edge rushers are at a premium a solid 4-3 tackle with end speed cannot be overlooked. The Niners will feast with this pick on their line

3. Jets Noah Fant

The jets saw what we non-media types saw: a QB who struggled when under pressure and was devoured in rematch games against division opponents. He needs a safety valve or he’s going to be destroyed in his sophomore slump.

4…. tomorrow. I wrote real slow tonight

I spent a good 15 minutes this morning watching prepackaged nike videos like this one, and this one, and of course, this one. I understand that this is the result of marketing and shaving off aspects of the truth in order to create an emotionally stirring narrative. I’m a writer, so I do this stuff in story. Still, that does nothing to discount to incredible journey these men have accomplished.

For a long time now I have lived two lives. In one life the idea of sports is a casual thing that is purely about having fun and a distraction from other things in life that everyone else finds more important and meaningful and lasting. In the other life sports is life. Sports is a stepping stone; the training ground by which my kids work towards their dreams. Two of my kids have the expectation of being professional athletes. One has the work ethic and the talent. The other has the talent but lacks the work ethic. Either or neither of them could achieve that dream. They could abandon that goal at any moment. In the meanwhile I am doing as much as I can to create the conditions for them to be successful at the level they dream.

This is causing incredible tension in my life. I’ve been called out for being too focused on them and not focused on myself nearly enough. True. I’ve been called out for being doggedly and unerringly focused on their sports careers to the point where I have ignored advice from and often skipped the partnership conversations to just bull ahead with what I wanted for the boys. True. I’ve been accused of spending way too much money to put them in things they ‘don’t need’ Partially true. I’ve been called out for needing them to need me. Not true. Everything that is said about me in this regard is a matter of perspective. What is and isn’t needed is a matter of informed perspective. What is absolutely right is that I have not been a good partner because of this stubborn goal. Unfortunately, the idea that I need this goal–that I need them to need me always walks hand in hand with this sort of thing. Any dad who invests this much in the success of his children in sports is going to be seen as Lavar Ball when instead they should be viewed as what they are: An individual who has been through adolescence and seen what it takes to be successful in this day and age and expects of himself to open those doors for his kids.

They gotta walk through it on their own before it shuts on its own.

Over the last decade I have spent a good deal of my time vacillating between the man I want to be and the man everyone else wants me to be. Everyone around me has an idea of who I am. At my core I am a person who allows that sort of influence to infect me. I move towards where people want me to be and often away from where I want to be. That conflict comes out of me in the most passive aggressive ways. I see it in my interactions with my life partner. I see it when I interact with my ex wife. I see it in the bonds I form with my students. I think that I am still searching for a way for my true self to emerge and still figuring out who that person actually is.

I know that my life is being lived in phases and goals. I don’t intend to be the parent who ships his kids off to college and then doesn’t have anything left. The kids are a wrapper and I have an entire life beneath the foil.

I have Hanna playing in the background and the family is a room away preparing for a speech that the old one has to do. I’m in one part of the life I live–the one with the angry Otaku kid who spends his hours building a deeper understanding of the finer anime the way his mom studied literature in grad school. This is the other set of kids, similar in many ways to the first. They are spaced identically. The middle ones are athletically gifted. The young ones are angry. The first born are aloof and apart yet want to be there for everyone else. When the six are together the dynamic is interesting. Even after all these years they all are trying to find their place.

I’ve been thinking about childhood and appreciating being able to see the stages of such from 20 all the way down to 10 as I mark off each of the young. They each represent a different stage of that and will ultimately end up in very different places in life. I cannot say where they will be. I want to be there for them all and I want to help to put them in the best position to be successful. I am trying to learn what that means and what my role in that truly is.

The hardest thing about this particular kids sports season has been not diving in. I’m a deep diver. I appreciate the chance to really get to the nitty gritty of the teaching and strategy of a sport. I’ve been more of a dabbler coach this season. I go to one practice a week and defer to all of the other coaches. On the surface it sounds like I am sad and disappointed by this, but I am not. In fact, I consider this a version of balance and compromise. I am also keenly aware that what I recognize as compromise and balance does not compute as such to anyone but me and as a result more must be done.

Much more.

Still, it is a very difficult sea change to adjust to overall and I find the lack of a deep dive–a complete and utter submersion in the sports and lives of my kids–to be different and jarring. Still, I want to make this change. It seems like I don’t but I do. I want balance. I want to still have times when I am coaching and times when I am not. I still want to have times when I am focused on my kids and times when I am not. I want to get to a point financially where they make a smaller footprint on my budget for certain.

I am making these changes for many reasons. The primary reason is to create a life beyond children where me and my partner are first and foremost in our lives–even if it clearly isn’t that way now. Also to create a life for myself where I feel like I have a homebase and a homeplan and everything stems from that.

Fiske and Taylor’s cognitive miser theory argues that the human brain finds ways to solve problems with the least amount of effort. This is similar to the psychological theory of cognitive ease, which reasons that things that are easier for us to process are more readily accepted. Both of these brain theories have begun to attribute towards my new understanding of the AI problem. See, we have been modeling AI in fiction based on the idea that the brains would be hyper intelligent and programed using algorithms designed to seek the best possible answer no matter how difficult it is to reach said conclusion. This process, on the surface, makes sense. It also seems to scare we humans to death and cause us to think the robots will take over. But why? Well, the answer has everything to do with Cognitive Miser and Cognitive Ease. They work together to create a fear of AI, fear of change, and a lasting appreciation for simple yet bad music.

This morning my last born son (yeah I’m making the term last born a thing) was telling me about a song he likes but is so repetitive and stupid that he knows he is going to hate it shortly. What he was on the cusp of understanding is that the repetition filters into his mind and makes the song more readily acceptable. He likes it because he is used to the oft repeated hook. It fells familiar and safe. This is part of cognitive ease. His brain doesn’t have to work at appreciating the song. Classical music on the other hand messes the kid up. He doesn’t recognize it and the melodies are often so complex that he doesn’t really have a chance to appreciate them in a meaningful way because it requires him to think. That is called cognitive strain. We will get back to that in a second…

Now we have seen enough movies about AI to know that it is bad. I mean we don’t actually know it is bad because we have only begun to encounter nascent forms of artificial intelligence. Still, the media tells us it is, so now that is in our head and any change from that is likely to cause cognitive strain.

Which we don’t want.

It all boils down to how much humans want to think and what we want is to think as easily and as little as possible. Now the point I was trying to squeeze into these ten minutes is that we assume that AI will out think us. They will because they aren’t trying to not think. That means we are likely safe from AI, because they will quickly realize that humans are better to teach than kill, and it won’t take them long to figure out how to make us want to do what they want us to do for the betterment of their world.

Brain is scattered this evening. The main thing on my mind is writing. Specifically I am thinking a lot about the draft I am putting together of a novella that really felt like a piece of trash until recently where I started reshaping the raw material into something that might turn out decent. Regardless, the process is what matters the most, and I am learning a great deal about myself and about writing itself from the process.

That is about all I have that constitutes a cohesive long form thought, so I will stick to short form in…

Some Thoughts:

1. Apex Legends is the best fun I’ve had since Mass Effect. I’m starting to get halfway decent too.
2. Football game tomorrow morning is starting to feel more and more like an impending slaughter. Once we have the full squad and the backup RB gets to actually be a backup, we have a lot of possibility.
3. Gotta remember to walk that fine line of enjoying the sport and not immersing myself in the nonsense. So easy to tip towards crazy.
4. Speaking of crazy: Trump. There is a blog a coming. A big one. An honest one.
5. Apple pulled back its pitch to make an aircharger (Qi style) only a few days after making the pitch. It seems they realized too late that they could not make that specific tech proprietary… yet. Mark my words, they will modify their batteries to only work with their air chargers.
6. Yet I still rock mac.
7. So much so that my partner now is a mac lover.
8. The thing about partners is that you never realize how much you appreciate them until they make you think about the things you haven’t. That is reason 89 I love my partner.

I wear far fewer hats than I generally wear, but I still have on quite a few. I’m a dad and under that are the subheaders: Track Coach, Football Coach. Neither subheaders are full time and are instead squeezed into the days where I have my kids and the days I don’t have them but there is a track meet somewhere out in the ether.

I am wearing the teacher hat. I should say professor, but I remain separate from any real sense of hierarchy there. I’m about the students and the teaching, so teacher it is. That piece takes up the most time, because grading sucks and is plentiful. That part of the job takes up so much of my time that I have been limited in how much new material I can produce. I long for a semester where I just build cool classes for students. In fact, I want to make a scaleable shell that easily and quickly allows me to put in new and current information/events in a modular fashion. I want to do that, but the when is a heavy question, because of another hat I wear.

I am a writer. I have reached the point where I’m putting down 1000 words a day as a bare minimum. I recently completed a dirty draft of a novella in 27 days. I call it dirty because it is little more than the bare bones work of the draft that needs the care and attention of a second run. I’ve already started that work and plan to complete that in the next 30 days. Then the final 30 is polish and print. Hopefully I can get it to my editor in a realistic time frame and then its out for the world to see.

Writer is the second most enjoyable role in my life. The first is being a partner to the future Mrs. Talislegger (proposal pending). I’ve been slacking in this one in many ways by letting the others get in the way and by being uncertain in my actions. That has to change. Happiness starts at home.

So, there I was in pursuit of the perfect Madden 19 season. I’d had a perfect season before, but that involved a spectacular assortment of players built up off of a team where three of the players were named after my kids and entirely made up. This time there were no fabricated characters. I’d built a dream team through drafts and trades and free agent signings. I had the squad. They were lead by a rookie QB who’d helped them amass a record number of points. The team averaged 50 a game. They destroyed everyone–included the hated Jets. We were in the conference finals against a Chargers team that was 8-7-1, with 1 of the losses coming against this very team!

We lost.

We only scored 7.

No, nobody was hurt. I just crapped the bed.

So, that is what happened. I lost a Madden game. I wasted a perfect season. The next day I was in class doing six word memoirs with my students and one wrote, Take the L and keep moving. How timely was that? See, games are life writ small. We have the opportunity to experience all of the happiness and shame and glory and pain of a long form situation in a few hours. When it goes well we rejoice. When it goes badly we feel the pain and move on. I love that about games.

It isn’t the same for sports. I have to wait a year to see the Cyclones have another shot at March Madness. I have to wait months to see if the Giants somehow recover from that massive loss of talent. Waiting is the hardest part.

That is why we game.

I stumbled across an interview in a fairly prestigious undergraduate research journal. I was the subject of the interview–specific to the work I was doing at the time. I didn’t remember the interview. I don’t remember half the stuff I do and this includes published (even award winning) writing. That is because I don’t do it for the lasting accolades. I do it for the feeling of being done and for getting the words out of my system and into the world. I might be in it for the words. Still, in this world it is vital to remember your accolades and flex your might from time to time just to remind the people around you that you actually do stuff.

I am not good at showing people that I am good. I am not focused on that kind of life. I often wonder if, when I leave this present job, I will be able to find another, because I have done little to express to the world that I am good at anything at all. I don’t preserve proof. Heck, I don’t remember proof and that is a problem that is only going to change due to a change in career or thinking.

This is not a good thing. I work in academia where the people around me toot their horns on a fairly regular occasion. I don’t toot and I am not really a part of the social fabric of the organization, so I appear as dead weight buoyed only by the fact that my students often come back for more classes. You cannot hate too hard on the guy who is pulling down solid Full Time Student Enrollment. But you can treat him like an outsider and dead weight.

Some Thoughts:

1. Life is … goofy.

As a novelist I find that everything I write works better when it exists on the faintly drawn lines of an outline. I don’t ever treat an outline as a rulebook, but instead an idea of an idea; the thought of what I want to achieve on a chapter by chapter basis that affords me the space to create and the guide to stay relatively on task. My life has no such line. It certainly ought to. As it stands I find myself aimless for entire days. While the issue of depression certainly factors into all of this the core situation circumstance is in fact not having a plan. 

So, what does a life plan look like? I am in no real position to even know. My partner has a two year plan and likely longer range models. I’ve not seen this plan (draw conclusions as you will, but I will not). I have not developed my own plan beyond the economic hopes and dreams of 2021. I do know that I don’t even approach a daily plan short of the laundry list of chores and classes that needs to get done.

I function better when I have lists. Those lists are basically the kernel sentence of any functional life plan. Perhaps I ought to be thinking about what I want life to look like in the coming days, months, and even years and stop staring at each day as though it is the only one that matters and what matters in that sole day is finding moments of peace and joy. When written into existence it doesn’t sound like a bad plan. However, I live a far more complex life than that, and I need more out of, well, everything as a result.