10 Minute Rule

Video Games are meant to be a distraction from the day to day grind. They are meant to lift us up and afford us a temporary glimpse at success. It is a precarious balance. If a game is too hard –if the entry curve is too steep–then it affords little chance of early victory. If the opposite occurs than winning means nothing. Riding that wave means winning and losing just enough to stay interested. If you ride the wave long enough it becomes a habit and maybe even an addiction. It sucks at your time until you don’t go a day or even a few hours without playing.

I’ve been there so many times that I can firmly say that gaming is my addiction. My latest fix is Clash Royale. Today I deleted the game from my phone. I hid it for a while, but my kids play, so I played. I played all the time. I played during commercials and while kids watched videos in class and during the slow moments of shows. I played all the time. I was decent at it but never actually good. I spent a little cash on the game in the beginning, but the grind is what got me where I was and where I was didn’t actually mean anything. See, the game works on trophies. Most recently I was at 4200. I dropped nearly 400 trophies in a 24 hour span and straight up quit. I deleted it, because I actually started to feel like I could not win. No matter what I did I could not win. I felt entirely powerless and addicted to trying to gain power through this useless game that, in the end, means nothing.

So, I turned on another game.

So, I started losing in that game too. I didn’t fall into anger this time. Instead I put the game down and picked up this blog. You see, gaming replaced writing to a certain extent. Once upon a time those moments were filled with words and story. I would build worlds instead of fall into multiplayer realms someone else created. Game was balanced with what I really love, which is the words and the words. I didn’t realize that until I got so angry about this particular game. I lost my sense of balance. Now I have to find a way to stand up.

Today’s composition class was one to remember. I finally launched my conspiracies unit in the way I wanted. I began the talk with an exercise my partner calls, Stranger than Fiction. In this iteration I used a series of conspiracies and situations both true and false. I gathered data from Time and NPR and Snopes. I went to Alex Jones and the National Review. I pillaged the Onion. I wanted to gather as many different kinds of truths and lies as I could. What I learned from the experience was that students come pre-programmed with biases–especially political ones. Here are the two they absolutely believed:

1. Donald Trump, in promoting his Trade War against China tweeted, “China is taking us to the cleaners. Every dollar we give them enables this tragedy to go on. We are in a crisis. Americans need to stop ordering takeout from Chinese restaurants. When in these places we need to stand up and walk out without paying. #MAGA”
2. Nancy Pelosi went to a benefit for kids with cancer recently, but she was so drunk she was asked to leave. After filling a beer mug with vodka and sprinkling some Crystal Light in there for color, Pelosi was so drunk she started making fun of the hats the kids had made earlier. Art Tubolls, the billionaire who organized the event, says he’s very upset that things went the way they did: “I asked Speaker Pelosi to come so the kids could see how leadership was handling the government shutdown. She showed up drunk and left in a vegetative state. It was embarrassing.”

Both are lies. Neither is even remotely grounded in reality, but both are founded on the idea of what we want to believe depending on what side we are on. Here is another lie they believed:

• Denver International Airport stands above an underground city which serves as a headquarters of the New World Order. Theorists cite the airport’s unusually large size, its distance from Denver city center, as well as assorted alleged Masonic or Satanic symbols, and a set of murals which include depictions of war and death.

They wanted to believe these things, because belief was easy. Belief triggered cognitive ease. It reinforced things they’d always heard or ideas they suspected to be true. What they believed is in a sense what we all believe: They believe what they want to be true. What corresponds to what works best for their lives and the people in their lives. The struggle occurs is when what we want to believe is entirely unaligned with the truth.

That is happening a lot these days.

Some Thoughts:

1. The last L is love. It took a special person to remind me of that.

I’m reading (listening, actually) to the book White Rage by Carol Anderson. This is the 3rd in her series of books about inequality. This is the first I’ve read and it has me pretty angry and disturbed about a number of things. Sadly, not much of the information is new to me, but it does stir up a great deal of animosity about the systems of this country and the way these systems are constructed to keep certain people (be it a racial or socio-economic group) in power. There will be more about this text once I am done, but I started the 10 with this because it is part of a larger conversation about economy of time. I’m trying to make the most of my minutes, and reading more stuff is part of that. Writing more stuff is part of it as well.

I’m back to listing. I have a daily word count I am working towards as well as a list of tasks I’ve been able to stay on top of. This is a new way of me not drowning in work four weeks into the semester.

As for this blog, honestly, this is a weak one. I am low on the thought power. While I am revving up the brain power for writing this new project I find that little else of the discourse is happening. That is another part of the listing. It allows me to compartmentalize and continue to make time for stuff that is not the project I am writing.

I ought to add sleep to the list. I usually fight to avoid that one entirely.

When I was a kid I used to design role playing games based on these combat-driven sports I’d created in my head. Watching the rams v saints game reminds me of making those games. I’m specifically reminded of how I would build in penalties and bonuses based on crowd noise, home field, and even player temperament. In a sense I was coding the madden games before the madden games began to be coded in that faction. However, I never thought what I was doing was anything special. I figured these were the things—the ideas—that everyone had. This is a staple of my life. I think things up and assume everyone’s already done it.

This is not always the case. There are many ideas I’ve had as a writer only to see them bloom years later. There needs to be more trust or faith in myself. Believing in your ideas is the hardest thing for a writer to do next to actually sitting down and writing. I’m trying to make both these a reality for this latest group of projects I am working on. I especially mean to trust my ideas. That means abandoning the worry about originality and writing what I know and what I want.

That’s one to grow on.

It wasn’t too long ago that seeing a show about brown or Asian people was a big deal. It was considered a breakthrough to make a show about minorities for a non minority audience. I saw it as a stepping stone, and perhaps even one in the wrong direction at times.

Representation has always been a difficult issue. The goal, ostensibly, is for it not to be an issue. The goal is to watch characters of multiple races stream across the screen and it just feel natural. The goal is for the scene to feel like it comes from the place it represents. That’s part of why I really enjoyed Banshee on Cinemax. Their community, bordering on tribal land, presented a surprising mix of race in rural America. It spoke to race only when the specific characters who defined such things in negativity spoke to race. It was highly stylized and had other representation issues, but it wasn’t a really good start (and a pretty fun and layered story). The Punisher, I believe, picks up right there and takes us over the goal line.

I’m a longtime fan of the Punisher. I’m a pre-MAX comic book guy who dutifully sat through all the movies. This latest show (the only real show) is very good. It also is the first show in recent memory to expertly layer in race as not to even seem as though race was forced in. Instead it feels natural. It feels like New York, and Ohio, etc. The people of color aren’t always background. They have real roles and lives and problems that aren’t two dimensionally fixated on the color of their skin or the qualities of their culture. They are story worthy as individuals and rarely, if ever, does race come up—save for when it is defined by a specific character within the boundaries of that characters view of the world.

Good job, Marvel.

My phone AutoCorrect’s to learned. I think that defines the issue in a nutshell. I’ve always prided myself on being a learner. I come from a generation that placed an emphasis on learning (not to be confused with scholarship). We were defined by our adaptability and not only the ability to quickly absorb and acclimate to new tech but to push that tech forward. I’ve gone from Commodore 64 to quantum computing in my lifetime. I like to think this is because we accepted the idea that we were learning from those who came before, and continuing to learn long beyond achieving so-called expertise. However, in my life I’ve seen a shift from learner to learned. The emphasis is no longer on gaining new knowledge but accessing existing knowledge and being ‘in the know’. The idea of learning purely for the sake of personal intellectual growth is a unicorn in the wilds of our society.

I could blame google. Ease of access is always the downfall of effort. Still, blaming is not the point here. How do we cultivate change? I suppose I can do more in my own life. I live amongst largely fixed mindset individuals. There are a few even in that set who are open on occasion, like a storefront with set but limited hours. So perhaps personal action can infiltrate their hardware.

Still this isn’t about change either. Not yet. This is about awareness. I believe knowing a thing is the first step towards understanding it. After all, that is what learning is all about. I haven’t been the best learner as of late. My phone autocorrects me to the learned whenever it can. Still, perhaps, like it just did a sentence ago, through effort it will start to autocorrect in the other direction.

Today I watched the tail end of a math class and I was struck by one strange thing. This may not seem strange on the surface–certainly no stranger than actively and purposefully watching a math class when you’re not a student in that class. But it was strange, because it went against every fiber of my being.

This teacher was talking about the numbers and the formulas. She spoke about the math as if it existed in a vacuum disconnected from anything beyond the need to solve the equation. It bothered the hell out of me. It took me a moment to understand why it bothered me.

There was no context.

I teach English and creative writing. I cannot imagine a class in which I do nothing but explain how a comma is used vs a period or any other stroke of punctuation. Punctuation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a context. In fact, it helps to create context. Remember these oldies but goodies:

Let’s eat, Grandma!

Lets eat Grandma!

Yeah, the second has me remembering the Walking Dead too. That is because there is a context there. What I saw in that classroom utterly lacked content and as a result was both foreign and disturbing–like watching someone eat dog. I suppose, like dog, it makes more sense on the other side of the equation. It makes more sense, I suppose, in the culture of mathematicians to see things that way. However, community college professors are not teaching to 500 and 600 level mathematicians. I would argue that even at that level the equation has context and meaning outside of the nuts and bolts of the math. An engine is more than just pistons plus oil. You need to understand why and what you are trying to achieve.

That brings me back to writing. I’m writing a piece at the moment that involves a retelling of a certain history. This is all well and good, but to what purpose am I sharing this history? Why am I giving facts? There has to be a context. Today, as I write, I will realize my context. I will not eat grandma, and I will go forward with the notion that why absolutely matters.

Football is, in essence, a really dumb sport. If you really think about it 11 people (generally men) are trying to get an oblong ball across a line. Now only a few of those men are allowed to touch it. Two players: One, the de facto leader, and one the man who lifts it out of the dirt and grass, touch it about every time and then hand it or throw it to another man who must run towards the line until knocked to the ground. There are a number of rules surrounding the movement of this ball, all designed to limit the way in and number of times which the ball can be touched. The men, armored about the head and body, are expected to use a great deal of aggression towards their end goal of getting the ball across the line or taking it away from someone else. However, if they are too aggressive or not showing the proper form of aggression, or showing aggression towards the leader –especially that one–then one of the judges throws a yellow flag and moves their ball further from the target. This is football.

None of this is why I believe we love the sport so much. I believe the rules and general execution of the game are a hinderance. Football exists because we want to believe in something tangible. We want to believe that our side is better than the other side in whatever meaningless contest is being held, but we fight to give meaning to that contest. We defend that contest largely because to admit the foolishness of the contest is to admit that we ourselves are fools and have been sucked in to foolishness.

The hardest thing for a person with any sort of ego to do is to admit that they are wrong. There is the fear of the ridicule from being wrong but beyond this there is the moment where we are forced to question ourselves, our beliefs, and all we have built up as being of value and watch it fall down.

I saw a graphic arguing that Maslow’s hierarchy could be applied to fan relationships. I’m reposting it below:

Turns out I’m not the first person to think about this…

I want the Fast and the Furious theme to be playing as I write this. Okay, there we go… I’ve been giving a lot of thought into the role music used to play in my life vs. what has been going on. I have been adrift from the core of me in many ways, but the two I keep coming back to are reading and music. I love listening to music and used to do it nearly non-stop. That stop was generally to read a book or engage in some practice where I couldn’t use music. I listen to good music, bad music, all music and judge only occasionally (yes, I judge country and listen to country at the same time… I be like that). I read (as in past tense) good books, bad books, and judged only occasionally. Now both seem to be tertiary to my daily life, which is problematic to someone who is a writer.

The culprit is Amazon. I blame them for everything. Amazon is the real life version of Wall-E’s Buy and Large. They’ve gotten me with the Firestick and got me even more with the Audible service. I listen to books now. I’m not sure when was the last time I finished a print book. So we know the culprit:

Ease.

Yes, I know I said Amazon, but that is just the symptom. Things that are easy are things that we (I) tend to do more. It is easy to watch a trash show you’ve seen a dozen times (Hello, Friends.) instead of hunting for a CD you like. It is easier to listen to a book while handling mundane chores than it is to sit and take the time to focus and read. I fear I’ve lost my capability for the latter short of time on the beach.

So, what is the solution? Good old fashioned hard work. Gotta want to do it in order to do it. But do I?

I’m into the research for my latest project and simultaneously into the research for upgrading my classes. These are dramatically different fields of research, but in all of it a pattern is emerging. I am remembering how to be studious and how to be a writer. See, I took a break from the routine of writing as I do after every project. This is known as my continuing mistake. The spin down and eventually spin up require more mental energy than it does to stay on the path. Now I am spinning up, which makes me feel good and helps me to shift my priorities to where they ought to be. It helps me be thoughtful about a great number of issues and concerns in my life, and I feel quite excellent about where my head is at when I am writing.

But it is indeed like those first moments in the pool.

This time I really want to stay on task and that means having the next thing ready and keeping a low grade writing process running in the background of my brain. Writing is my life in so many ways, so to neglect it as I have been doing is a form of suicide. With classes starting up and a conference upcoming, I have a great opportunity to spin up quickly and keep the motor running.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m not entirely sure I stayed honest to the ten minutes last night. It felt short, and I may have started at :53 vs. 51. I made sure to start at :53 today and do this part first, so I’d be sure. After a while gauging ten minutes becomes organic, but there are times where you slip in and out of the narrative and 10 can seem like no time at all or quite a large slice of forever.
2. Struggling with competitiveness and self worth. I’m at war with myself in many ways. I continue to be on this enormous losing streak in all forms of games and competition and it is growing annoying. Part of it is not wanting to compete but see others enjoy the game itself. Did I go Mike Tyson and lose that killer instinct? It is hard, because that sort of thing seems to have never mattered to my partner but has been the end all for me for my entire life. I’m trying to find a psychological and emotional middle ground, but this too seems difficult. Perhaps the key is knowing when (and how) to turn it on and off. It seems to go off by itself far too often.