10 Minute Rule

First, come to the paper everyday. I mean you have to write in order to be a writer. You have to accept that a great deal of what comes out is crap. It could be on a day where you think you have your best words and don’t. It could be on a day where your heart isn’t in it. You gotta write constantly. It is like training for an event and it is like acclimating to cold water. You gotta be in it to be in it.

Next, the writing is work and the work is and must continue to be its own reward. The process itself seems boring and often grueling. It is. I used to love the process as a kid. There are still moments where I love the process, but for the most part I’ve fallen out of love with the process and I’m trying to fall back in love again. Not an easy task to accomplish.

Read. You must see good writing to be a good writer. You have to know what it looks like in order for it to take shape in your head and become something uniquely your own.

Explore and imagine. I think that this is the part that got me where I am today. Both in a good and bad way. I used to publish something called the Idea Archive. I would develop characters and plots and post them freely to the world. It was an everyday thing for me–ten minute rule writ large. I stopped and when I did a certain amount of my passion for the art withered.

Payment can happen but it isn’t why you write. I forgot that. I turned the art into the grind and I didn’t want to grind. I used to say that I burned myself out as a writer, but the truth is more likely that I got paid and decided that this was suddenly about the money and the cost benefit of how much time I was spending on the work.

These are just a few of the basics that I know I need to work on. Hopefully my journey and my stresses can be helpful to another writer out there trying to see their way through to staying the course.

I wrote today. It felt like stretching after not stretching for a long time. I feel like it is always this way with me and the words. I try and try to fall back into the way of writing and struggle through more often than not. I honestly don’t know why anyone still supports me. I can see that support waning on the part of the ones closest to me as they have to be asking themselves if I really want this. I can feel the belief slipping and I know why. I haven’t done my part. I am not doing my part.

Some Thoughts:

1. If I do go back to coaching a last season of flag football it will be phenomenal. I feel like I should give my youngest one last look and do it well. I’m talking full blown practices where everyone learns how to play every position and we battle for spots and we have fun and we go hard.
2. Strange to think about a sport like football where you are openly routing for someone on the other side to get hurt. Hurt bad.

August 9th is the beginning of the Giants 2018 quest for the championship. It starts on a field in Cleveland where Beckham will be trying to outdo his best friend for one quarter of a pre-season game. The Giants look good. Less good than they did about 24 hrs ago when their supplemental draft pick CB was actually scheduled to play. They did also grab Conner Barwin, so they will at least be Madden legit.

I’m excited about the upcoming season and equally excited about seeing my boys do their thing on the field. All three are playing on new squads in new leagues and at a higher level. Two are in AYF again after a brief move to the weaker NYS league. The last is playing freshman ball at the high school, where things finally get real.

I need to be more organized than ever to balance all of the crap I need to do and want to do. This is an exciting season for everyone.

Some Thoughts:

1. Learning more and more about being a dad vs. a coach. I’m watching my son be made to play new positions on offense and defense and learning about how he responds to change and opportunity. He was moved from TE/WR to HB and from Safety to Corner. The defensive adjustment is going to be greater I believe. He’s played some HB before and in the double wing he will have a lot of opportunity to learn to run between the tackles, which will be useful moving forward. The corner work is different because he is a big time hitter. He is used to laying back and waiting for someone to crack or ball hawking for an easy pick. This is more intensive.

A long time ago in a world barely recognizable to our own, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe coined the phrase, “The Devil is in the details.” This was almost certainly a play off of the then oft-used ‘God is in the details’ but Mies Van Der Rohe was snarky and snark sticks. Snark is also real. When we speak of the singularity we often talk about intelligent machines whose learning curve grows exponentially to the point of becoming a straight line. This seems possible if you listen to Kurzweil or follow the initial trajectory and understanding of Moore’s Law. What neither of these incredible intellects took into account was the basic stupidity that lives at the intersection of code and commerce.

I am an AT&T customer. I am a Direct TV customer. For a long time the companies asked me to merge my service bill into one thing. I eventually relented and opted for a single bill to make life easier on everyone. I was wrong about that. It made life hell on billing.

My DTV bill is a paper thing that arrives periodically. I do not get a monthly bill. I get a bill when DTV decides that they need to remind me to pay. See, I was on auto billing and electronic billing, but then I merged bills and my DTV bill fell into a limitless void that allowed the company’s digital arm to largely deny my existence. What do I mean? Well, I cannot login to the DTV website anymore because it directs me to the ATT website. That website apparently has no idea that I am a DTV customer (my occasional bill and multiple receivers that still get regular service argue otherwise). Onwards the digital hot potato bounces. In short, I know I get DTV but nobody else is entirely sure about that reality until they really want my money. Then I have to call them, sift through this nonsense repeatedly in order to pay.

It is not a pleasant experience. It is also not an anomalous one. The merging of corporate entities and protocols is always a headache thanks to machine architecture and social architecture between corps. This argues that our tech singularity is going to be hampered by continuing developments in the financial world and that chaos appears to be the only constant in an ever changing digital landscape. Well, there is a second constant. When they want you to pay, they will find you.

 

The dry heat shall be my undoing.

I cannot stand it. Well, I can stand it for a time, but that window is shrinking. I cannot be outside for more than a dozen minutes without beginning to melt in the 112 degree heat. Turns out I’m in the majority there. Most people I’m sharing space with in this Chic-fil-A half filled with kids are returning from or headed to a pool somewhere. It is perhaps a function of where I am that pools are so plentiful and so accessible by the people who are raising other people’s kids. It is also true that the majority of the people in this space are nannies or babysitters. There are a handful of birth moms slouched against the heat, their ears ringing with bad elevator music and the joyful shouts of kids at play. And here I sit with a laptop and no kids feeling more like an outcast here than anywhere else.

I spit out words and worlds slowly, hopeful that some find an orbit suitable for habitation; that I can forge story and universe as my own sun lashes out at me with fire and light.

In other words, it is too damn hot to think and I have a great deal of writing to do before I can feel any real sense of accomplishment. I’m trying to work on seeing the process as an accomplishment on its own. I know this is the better way to think and behave in regards to my craft. It isn’t easy to spend hours on a project, come away with a few dozen usable words and feel like that’s okay. That feels too much like wasted time and energy that could’ve been devoted to an endeavor with more tangible (if temporary) results.

Part of that mindset is reflective of the coming coaching season. I am not part of any coaching staff for the first time in a long time. While that has been hard to let go of, it is a good sign that I at least recognize the temporary pleasure of coaching. You work your butt off to see these kids be successful and yourself be successful and you leave with nothing to show for it. Even if you get a championship, it doesn’t go to you but to the head coach (or that guy’s kid). Your evidence of success is what your kid walks away with. However, if you don’t coach your evidence of success is still what your kid walks away with. At least I figured that much out.

Now I gotta write.

I devote a great deal of time and money to my kids–especially when it comes to sports and video games. This is no more apparent than in the weeks leading up to the start of school. This is the time I refer to as pre-season. This is a calm before the storm, because everything that follows feels chaotic. We are running around from sport to sport, spending evenings on practice fields and at games. The same is true of video games. Between now and October all of the hottest games will be releasing updated titles. Battlefield, Black Ops, Madden, etc. Somehow all of that gaming stuff means less in the face of Fortnite, but I remain convinced that fad will burn itself out in time. Ultimately it has to, because there is not much else that can be added to the gameplay itself save new maps.

School is also going to be a big change for us coming soon. High school specifically. My eldest is about to take on young adulthood (formerly known as ‘the teens’) and I don’t know that either of us are ready for that.

 

I went off to spend a little time by myself. I didn’t think about being productive or playing games or reflecting on life. In reality I just went off to be alone and see what comes of it. What did come of it was a bit of all of the above. I was reflective, especially about why I needed alone time. I did play games–somewhat out of habit and somewhat out of a desire to check out of this world and into those familiar worlds where I had that specific kind of power and joy. I was also productive but not as productive as I have been as of late. All of it came down to finding my way back to that soft reset and moving forward from there.

I’ve been feeling a bit out of control lately. Not in the sense of careening and craziness but instead more in the sense of the loss of executive function. I don’t make decisions anymore. I tend to simply rely on the choices of others or do, largely what others want to do, or just sit there dumbly and adhere to whatever comes up on a TV screen. It is in this latter fashion that I wound up watching Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Of course, once I started I made an effort to see it through, even though it wasn’t worth seeing and caused more problems in my life than it was worth (Causing any problem is more than value of that film). I don’t make choices because of a number of reasons. For one I’ve come to feel like the happiness of others is worth more than my own. For another I have anxiety about causing rifts in my relationship so I’ve started to think in the ‘go along to get along’ mode, which is not very healthy. Lastly, I have not felt that the things I value are valued by the people around me, which makes me extremely hesitant to voice opinions, because it feels like the opinions/choices/etc. will only be further devalued.

None of this feels intentional by the half-dozen or so people in my life. I do not blame them. I don’t feel like this is a blame situation. I do feel like I haven’t been fully and consciously aware of this and as a result I needed to have a soft reset. I needed to get back executive function.

So many thoughts churning this morning. I think I will deliver them to you MMQB style.

Some Thoughts:

1. Trying to lose weight is difficult. I’ve adopted a low-carb diet and it has effected my general mood in negative ways, my energy level in positive ways, and my overall weight minimally. It hasn’t been much more than a week (I believe I started on the 8th) and my expectations are very high. My results are not. I expected to lose close to 10 lbs by August. This was never realistic. I have lost roughly six as of two days ago and I weigh so much right now that the six doesn’t even show. I absolutely need to do more than I am doing. I need to add the gym into my regular routine.
2. I’ve had every opportunity to write over the past few days and I really haven’t. Instead I’ve watched very bad TV (Electric Sheep on Prime and the Kingsman: The Golden Circle) in the moments I could’ve spent working. There is a lot to be said for vegging out but this is just ridiculous. If I want to write, I ought to be writing. So, why am I not writing?
3. Finally saw Sorry to Bother You. This was an experience. As a fan of surrealist cinema (I’ve watched practically all of Cronenberg and Lynch) I was still taken back by the content of this. Bold proclamations were made and laid right out there on the surface. A lot of what was shown/said resonated and I know the director intended us to draw connections to things that are happening right now and have been happening for a long time. They rope you in with ‘use your white voice’ but that really only scratches the surface of what the film is getting at. Surprisingly, I can direct my sci-fi class to the work and feel like it absolutely works.
4. I’m not going to go on a political rant here, but I have to say that the marriage between the Republican Party, the Republican news machine, and Donald Trump’s family is astounding. At one point recently Stephen Colbert asked, how dumb do you think the American people are? I think you missed the point here. It isn’t about being dumb so much as it is about being easily convinced to go along with something so long as you think it keeps you as part of the in group, safe, and works towards what you’ve defined as your better interests. Unfortunately, they tend to define your better interests when the reality is that they just want you to listen so they can remain in power working towards whatever agenda keeps them in power and reaping the benefits.

Picture Yueyang City, a thriving waterside city in China. As clouds fill the horizon something else begins to take shape behind the clouds. Suddenly there in the mist is a distant city that cannot possibly be there. Yet there it is.

I don’t know about the validity of the photo or what really went down here, but this is yet another curious event that falls into the realm of the creative research experience I want to offer in the fall about unsolved mysteries. I don’t expect students to be able to solve this one. In truth, I doubt it is even real. Still, it corresponds with the age old phenomena of Fata Morgana, which deserves research and attention. Humans have been seeing illusions for years. Our brains are wired to fill in the blanks where they can in order to allow an image to meet expectations. This is, in many ways, the fundamental science behind magic tricks.

Teaching the writing of research papers is terribly boring work on the surface, because people don’t often desire to be there. Likewise they lack the fundamental drive to do the deeper research necessary to suss out a critical thinking problem. Instead of thinking like Sherlock Holmes they want to think like Sam the Google searcher. Having interesting problems to unravel should stimulate that hidden desire to learn more. Maybe I’ll even get them to step outside the box a little as well, opening their minds to new ideas and experiences.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m happy. Worried I’m not being the best partner, but still happy to be able to be a partner.

Turn on the NFL Network. Heck, turn on any sports network. The NFL training camps are about to open and everyone is talking quarterbacks. However, nobody is talking Eli Manning. It feels good to see Eli in the comfortable shadows again. That’s where Eli works—from the position of relative obscurity. Not a soul is talking Giants super bowl and that is exactly why the Giants are going to sneak up on everyone.

Let’s keep it in the qb conversation. Eli is dealing with yet another new OC and new offense. By all intents and purposes this should mean a step backwards, but I feel like it is the opposite. This new look is designed to offer more pocket protection and exploit some of those matchups he quietly exploited last year. What do I mean? Manning had the lowest ranked receiving and running back corps in the NFL last year yet still managed to have a statistically impressive line of connections to guys who for the most part are bench players or out of the league this year. He worked with junk and a terrible line and now he has some real talent around him in an offense that maximizes that talent.

Sure, this might be a fanboy talking big about his team, but the Giants improved at almost every position on offense. New line. WR are healthy. A freakish athlete of an RB. Save for Eli and a budding talent at TE we are talking about a new team here. If the camp and pre-season allow the chemistry of these talents to gel (and based on the pics coming out of everyone’s instagrams it is) then we are looking at a new look Giants offense to go with a new look Giants defense that is going to surprise people with its suddenness.