10 Minute Rule

So, Evan Engram is cleared to go on Sunday. This pleases me to no end, because I am an avid believer in the power of the NY Giants and their still-suspect line. I believe that an intact Giants team can build steam over the first few weeks in the face of a tough schedule. It goes Jags, Cowboys, Texans, Saints, Panthers, Eagles. Basically, it is every team expected to be a real playoff threat and, oh yeah, the defending champs. 

In spite of a rash of injuries the weakened Giants were in a number of those games last year and they are going to be quite a bit better this year. Odell is growing up and his WR squad is dangerous. 

I’m excited about the weekend because I will finally get to watch a live game. It hasn’t happened in some time. 

I’ve completely fallen off my diet plan. I buried my face in a bag of chips right before this blog as a sort of sad nod to the relapse. In truth, I have fully relapsed. I have been eating deserts far too often and the other morning I had pancakes. Once in a while the sweet, syrup-slathered bread circles might be alright, but I think they helped push me back towards failure. 

I gained two pounds over the last two days. In contrast I’d been losing a pound a week prior to relapse. This is a two week setback and reflective of how easy it can be to lose your way in anything and everything. This is a setback and not a failure. Still, I recognize how easy it can be to fail. I realize that there are only so many setbacks a person gets in life before they cannot do it any longer. 

I haven’t failed at this or at writing yet. I have failures in my past and perhaps in my future as well, but I get to chose where I am willing to fail. I’m not willing to fail at this.

Life is cycle and routine. I am trying to invest in a routine that is productive vs. destructive and the outcome thus far has been subpar. I’m probably being generous. The truth is I am struggling with the concept of living two lives. In one I am the dad-vehicle moving kids to and from practices and finding time between trips to feed kids, handle homework, and perhaps even take a break of an hour or two to play games to stay sane. 

On the other three days of the week I am a quiet family man, present and involved and benefited with a beautiful partnership and kids who do their own thing for the most part, but make time to hang with us parents a bit. 

Neither existence is what I want or what makes me happy entirely. I think I am looking for a compromise or balance between the two. I am looking for help on the one side and more time to do the things I love on the other. In both areas I am looking for a comfortable space/time to write. In essence I don’t write on the hectic life days save for the Friday Write Day and 10 minutes a day of this stuff. It is not ideal.

Solutions? Nothing yet. I’ve been dealing with it for a while and searching for that elusive and oft destructive acceptance. In some cases acceptance is wonderful, but in this case it encourages me to engage in a lifestyle that is not sustainable. I need to find one that is.

Some Thoughts:

1. I am worried about my diet. I’m out of ketosis and I noticed that I am back up to 220 after hitting 218. That low my reflect a natural plateau, which means I need to do more than negative caloric intake to go down further. That more is clearly exercise, and I have not made time in my life for such a practice. 

It is cut day in the NFL as the rosters trim to 53. I won’t go into all of the teams, but I will talk about some that have me interested in learning more. The Jets traded Bridgewater in order to make space for the QB of the future. The USC product Sam Darnold has no future in my book. He’s a limited game manager who strongly leans to one side of the field for completions. Can he get better? Yes. Will he behind this line and this offense? No. He’s headed for Paxton Lynch land. More specifically, he is headed towards failure in slow motion. 

Jets be damned. I’m a Giants fan first. After watching all of the pre-season work I have the answer to the Davis Webb question. No. That is not the guy up next. In fact, he just got cut. This means the Giants will be looking for a QB either through free agency or, more likely, through the draft process next year. They need someone to push the new kid for a roster spot just like the new kid pushed Webb off the roster. 

Actually, Webb pushed himself. He was inaccurate in pre-season and while the new line isn’t as strong as we all would hope, they protected him long enough to deliver good throws. However, no good throws emerged. With any luck he will survive cuts and reemerge on the practice squad with the humility to play harder and earn his starting nod. What a storyline that would be.

The NFL is all stories and youth football tries to model itself in that vein. I say this because I just became aware of a secret meeting of coaches in the cadet ranks where my youngest plays. The idea of the meeting was to review film of a game against my son’s team and for the coaches to come together to find a way to stop their offense. They supposedly met for six hours with the top coaching staffs in the division working together to learn how to beat us. This is too much. This is hilarity. Hopefully it doesn’t work, because now we are in a sense the underdogs and that, my readers, is a story. 

Some Thoughts:

1. Youth football is barely noteworthy, but I am pleased to see my boys winning games. 2-0 and 1-0 respectively and they still have so much to learn. It is a happy Sunday when you win Saturday. Of course, they are kids so the losing only sticks for a hot second.

Writing is a habit. What happens when you don’t stick to the habit is that you waste a lot of time trying to ramp back up to the pace you need to be at in order to be productive. My plan has been to set aside a chunk of time to write. I have been marginally successful at times and not successful at all as of late. In truth, I have been sucking at being a constant writer. I’m still working on it.

No, these ten minutes aren’t enough.

They count. They serve as a warmup of sorts or a download at the end of the day or a rant on the occasion such things are called for (I have a great deal to say about the way our government behaves in regards to political polarization). However, I am talking about two good hours of butt in chair. It isn’t professional level time, but it is a good and healthy chunk of effort that serves to get me going. 

Some Thoughts:

1. First time in a while that I have been truly ravenous. I ate everything in sight when I came home and it all tasted amazing. That being said, I cheated on my diet a bit. While a lot of what I ate was salad, I did inhale a bunch of chocolate and potato chips as well. Balance?
2. College football is back and I find that I really enjoy the game at this level again. I started to not care for a while and now I am back. Iowa State is back and up 7-0 on the Jackrabbits, but that game is going to need to be rescheduled. Weather got really bad fast. 
3. 
   

These blogs are getting done later and thus are less coherent. This is happening before cheesecake is allowed, so there is a reward for clarity. But not brevity. Perhaps the hardest part of the blog is to go the full ten minutes hands to keyboard. I’ve slipped out of consciousness in the past. I’ve wrote and rewrote and repaired lines. I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say mid sentence. This, fortunately, is not the condition of the present blog. Instead I feel like I am finally catching a little bit of mental goodness after a day where I was largely laid up in bed recovering from a surprise sick. 

While chilling I was able to take in a great deal of news about the McCain and Franklin services. In regards to the latter I was really shocked at the appearance of Ariana Grande. I didn’t give her the level of respect (pun noted) she deserved. Apparently Aretha did. 

I don’t want to talk about Trump. He doesn’t deserve it. The less we say the better. In truth it is more important to engage in real conversations about what it is we want to do with our country and where we go from here. What’s done is done. What do we do now?

What I am doing is taking in a weekend of fun with the kids starting with football at Oh dot thirty in the AM. Okay, so it is not that early, but it is hours before my normal work day would begin. Sadly, I have been waking up between 4:40 – 4:47 for weeks now, so this early weekend game doesn’t affect my sleep at all. 

Some Thoughts:

1. What do you get the love of your life that honors her day of birth? I feel like I set the bar so high that I cannot get there.

Four minutes until 9 PM and I am sitting in my library waiting for my youngest to come home. There are a few things to reflect on here. For one I have reached a point where I am so disconnected from my kids practices that he comes home and often even shows up without me. I call that progress. He’s more likely to call that disinterest. My kids are used to a certain level of involvement from me, and by me stepping back a little it feels like they feel like I am virtually detached from their lives. 

This is not true. 

In truth I feel like they are used to seeing me one way and in one phase of their existence. I’ve coached them all at various points in time and for the first time in their lives I am not coaching a single one. That time freed was meant to give me time and space to be a writer, but it hasn’t really been that way at all. That time and space is largely wasted, still devoted to helping the kids in some other fashion, or consumed by mundane tasks. I want to be able to call it a shift that allows me to to spend the time I would have otherwise spent on those menial tasks on writing but I just feel like I’m struggling with the guilt of not being there for them every waking moment and am, as a result, wasting the time I have trying to make up for the time not being spent on them.

What I need to do is get back to caring about myself as much as I do about seeing them succeed. This is another case of easier said then done. Whenever I focus on self betterment something rushes into that action void to claim my time and brain cycles. Perhaps the first step is to not look at that time as an action void. Then it might not invite such behavior.

Baby Steps.

I am approaching the 2018 football season with guarded optimism. Odell is healthy and though Engram seemingly left the Jets game with a concussion, he will be available for week 1. Meanwhile, Teddy Bridgewater was too costly for that Giants cap. I have long believed the G-men could be one of a handful of teams looking at Bridge as a next up guy for their franchise. Instead of NY he lands in NO as the air apparent for Drew Brees. This hasn’t been sold in quite so clear packaging, but it is what it is.

Football is a game of finance and physicality. The salary cap casualties are as interesting to absorb as the injury casualties. I don’t exactly know which category the NY Giants offensive line falls into but they are a casualty–especially after trading away their center. Hopefully there is enough there for the team to hold back a pass rush and give Barkley a few lanes.

In Jets land the starting QB job belongs to Darnold. Mr. USC is about to be pummeled and defeated in what I promise to be Jamarcus Russell level sadness. He’s not good. Sooner or later they’ll all figure out that he is a dink and dump qb who favors routes on his right side and under ten yards. He’s a game manager billed as a big deal. Hopefully he is vocal in the locker room.

That’s it. Rant over.

Some Thoughts:

1. I didn’t blog during the writing process today and it felt like cheating.

Just thoughts. Raw Thoughts.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been thinking about the fact that Omorosa brought a recording device into the situation room. It terrifies me that we don’t have the level of security at the highest level of government that we do at a private advanced movie screening. 
2. I am really happy with my classes this semester. So far.
3. I got pie. I needed good pie and that happened, so life is good.
4. Mile 22 was horrible. It seemed designed almost entirely to produce a sequel. Yet it wasn’t good enough to sustain itself. The best part of the film was the man they were transporting. 
5. Going to dive headlong into story tomorrow before I lose steam.
6. Drained and without words this fair evening…

My partner works at a a local university. I’m extremely proud of her for landing the coveted U-job (English majors might live for this kind of stuff). Today I went in to work with her in order to experience what her environment is like (it’s a couples thing. I think it is really important to know where your partner is coming from and what they do all day long. This is not feasible for most professions, but for what we do it is easy).

I used to teach at University before I transitioned to desert living. In truth, I came here to teach at University but wound up finding a home at the Community Colleges. I’m not mad about that or even jealous of her and her opportunities. On the one hand I recognize her ceiling for recognition and prestige is much higher than my own and I like that. On the other hand, none of that stuff actually has mattered to me for a good seven years. I just want the space and freedom to teach how I think works and fill classes with the context I find interesting. I get to do that where I am at and she’s starting to do that in her own space. 

What made me sit and ‘ten-minute’ this experience is the exasperation and occasionally awesome experience of being back on a U-campus. It is really different. It started with crashing my car into a curb as a group of Asian bicyclists straight cut me off at a turn. Apparently bikes have the right of way. As a New Yorker I find this antithetical to the very nature of human existence. Stupid should not survive. Period.

Once I moved past that (slowly and agonizingly and I hope my car is alright) we walked across the campus enjoying the sights and sounds and surprising lack of people. I suspect most students are about later-in-the-day classes. I love the campus’ quiet spots. It feels very post industrial, as if Matheson’s Vampire (actually they were more like Zombies in the short) story came to life not on the screen but in a real space overgrown with vines and desert trees. Experiencing the University space was my favorite part about working at a U. 

The students are different here than in CC. More formal and driven. The conversations I happened by were about their pursuits and classes. Students here deal in business, not bullshit. I miss that. I miss no nonsense high level discourse driven discussions in the classroom. I miss the bound community of a University. I miss teaching at a higher level. 

Some Thoughts:

1. Life is good.