10 Minute Rule

I’m considering the Athena template for web use right now. Not for this site. No, I’ve basically tabled the conversation on how to make this site sing. I have other sites I work with–mostly fun wheeling stuff like the houseofbeys beyblade site for the kids and a school site I cooked up for honors students. It is the latter that seems perfect for the Athena format. The more I study Athena, the more I recognize that it is the only ‘issue driven’ format I’ve used. The price is steep–$50, but is actually cheaper than what I spent on a suite of site templates that all ended up looking exactly the same (see houseofbeys.com) and offer very little in terms of design flexibility or user friendliness.

Odd that I rolled out of bed thinking about web design, but there are days where my mind is nothing but work work work. Usually its Thursday, because that marks the effective end of my teaching week.

Some Thoughts:

1. 5 minutes into the blog I ran out of stuff to say about the web. So, here we are finding 5 minutes more of stuff to write about.
2. We can start with the total inability to sleep. It has gotten worse over the past month, shifting from unable to get myself down to the sleep itself having very little value. I wake up with a sore neck every morning.
3. When I do wake up it launches me straight into the debate of whether or not I ought to go to breakfast. I used to catch a meal at Village Inn, but I haven’t been in so long that it would feel weird to go back. It’s the same narrative that formed at The Southern Rail where I used to go every Monday.
4. At some point I will blog about how I spend my time. Poorly. The answer is poorly.

Every month or so I have a brief conversation with myself. I sit down in silence and ponder the question, ‘Are you happy?’ Lately the answer is no. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I remain utterly unsettled. I can’t play the ‘where will you be in 5 years’ game and know where I’ll be living, who I will be with, or if I’ll even have the same job or a job at all. This is far too much uncertainty to be really happy with my life, so I’ve adopted a different type of thinking: Be in the moment. It works, temporarily, but the idea of ‘what next’ wanders through my consciousness every so often and the whole sad and difficult routine starts over again.

The moment is good. I spend a lot of my time with the love of my life. The rest of m time is spent playing with my kids, watching the shows I love most, writing, and coaching football. All of these phases of my day are moments of joy. Even now at the start of a new teaching semester everything feels amazing and promising and I want nothing more than to be in that classroom getting to know my learners.

Pull the frame back a bit and the picture looses focus. My relationship is totally undefined. My time with my kids is completely scheduled to the point where we have almost no free time. I’m watching shows to avoid the fact that my creativity engine is effectively stalled, and every day I spend at football practice I get the sensation that the head coach is going to bail and leave me this team and zero assistants. The teaching? I love my students, but I feel completely isolated on my campus. I feel like a ghost where a handful of people enjoy the haunt and the rest are lining up exorcists. In truth I think they’ve found the one loophole that could banish me from tenure.

Perhaps that is why I stay in the moment. Anything further down the path is too bleak at this point.

I had a really melodramatic post planned about how the beam–the eclipse–bisects my life, separating the man I was from the man I am and blah blah blah, but that isn’t true. It is definitely an example of where I am in life vs. where I want to be. I’m not anywhere along the path as I should be. I’m not celebrating the event with friends, because I don’t really have people in proximity who care about it as I do. I am not going to a public viewing because I don’t particularly care to be around people I don’t know. I am not going to a work viewing because that place doesn’t feel like home or like a safe space anymore.

I will say this: The big moments are when you pause to take stock of where you are at and consider how you feel about your place in the world. This morning I woke up to a large and empty house and recognized that I wanted neither. The space only matters when you have voices to fill it.

I’m glad the eclipse gives me a moment to take stock of the now and consider what I’m looking for the next time such an event comes around. Further it gets me thinking about what events do matter and readying myself to plan for them.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I am not centered. There really is no way to avoid it. I lack a center and as a result there is nothing that really grounds me. I tried to make it my partner, but that really isn’t fair to her for me to build everything around her when she too is in flux. I ought to build everything around writing, but something holds me back from that as well.
2. So it begins. The semester starts the day of the eclipse. That has to mean something. Or not.
3. Still waking up in pain every morning. The pain extends from my neck down my back. I’m going to try new pillows to see if that helps.

There are moments in your life when you see all the choices you’ve made laid out for you, like the decision tree in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Each step builds on the last leading you, inexorably, towards dragging your body across the kitchen floor at 1 AM on a Sunday morning. For me the chain of events started not with a birth but with the first back drama. I cast my memories back to the day, a few years ago, when my back was out and my partner was there to help me heal. Fast forward and my partner is on her own journey along the beam awaiting the coming eclipse and I am alone and in pain on the carpet. Every step from A to B was the result of my own actions and serve as a real wake up call to remind me that choices have lasting consequences and neglect can ultimately destroy everything you are trying to become.

I’ve long been the sort of person who fails to put on bug spray because mosquitos don’t seem like a big deal out here, only to be the fool scratching up and down his legs a day later. That is to say I am the worst boy scout ever. Though it is totally within my means to be prepared, I often approach life with the thoughtlessness that leaves me both clearly prepared and unable to act on the preparedness.

I bought a backboard specifically to help me stretch out my back and get it (and me) in better shape. I used it roughly a dozen times before it became a pants rack. Prepared, but failed to execute on the preparedness.

I bought and studied over 50 books on the writing process only to use nothing from them in the actual teaching of writing.

I can name half a dozen aspects of my life in which this is true–especially in love. It all points back to an infernal laziness or lack of will to execute anything in the mid term. I do well short term. I fail at mid term. In the long term, it adds up to an ultimate fail, which is why I found myself on the floor alone at 1 AM writhing in pain. It is where I stayed until 4 AM when I managed to get up and get myself to bed. I’m up again now and basically mobile. The pain is still there, as is the understanding of why it is. That’s what this blog is about after all.

I can count on one hand the number of Saturdays I have till football. That means there are only a handful of days I get to spend with my kids that aren’t dominated by sports. In that time I desire to go to the lake and down to the caves, really putting in some quality outdoor time. I haven’t scheduled any of this out or even figured how to make it a reality, but it is what I want to do. I want to strike a balance where it isn’t always rush rush rush in our lives. This week taught me that too much of something can be a real problem. Right now I have a kid who has two practices a day three days a week and practice at least once a day m-f. This is how it is for him through October. Did I mention he’s just moved into middle school and is learning to engage academically?

Kids aside, I am entering a year where I finally have a schedule that is conducive to life outside of work. Ideally, I can work from home multiple days or spend a wealth of time with my partner. Ideally doesn’t always work out for us, but that remains to be seen. Regardless, I made a decision recently that the universe can very much kiss my grits. In a lot of ways.  In regards to this it confirms that I am going to stand by this relationship and do everything in my power to make it work (whatever it is).

I think that about covers it. I didn’t mention writing because there isn’t anything to mention yet. There will be soon enough…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The Giant beyblade stadium: not a hit. The metal surface doesn’t perform nearly as well as the plexiglass. This leads to slower battles and less joy. I feel like the next step is to get a coating to spray on the stadium to make it smooth. I do not know such a thing exists, so in the meanwhile we have what we have.

I’ve had a lot going on this week and have run myself fairly ragged. There is a sickness going around the kids’ school and they brought that stuff home. In addition I’ve been trying to strike a fine balance between me time and everything else. It has resulted in forgetting to do a number of things… Such as being able to think in terms longer than…

Some Thoughts:

1. In a classic ‘What did I just get myself into?’ moment I find my mid kid playing mid-school soccer m-th and club football t, th, F. In other words, the t/th practices completely overlap. This is going to be a problem since I coach @ 5:30 on T/Th and cannot begin to pick him up. So, I need to find him daily rides home from practice and tell his coaches he is going to miss half a practice every week.
2. Speaking of practice, I was supposed to bring another kid to practice and just realized I did not do that yesterday… I think he missed it. I really think he missed practice on account of me.
3. This is proof that this being a dad thing is overwhelming me. Just a little…
4. So now I am trying to devise a schedule where I don’t go insane as a single dad. So far, not good.
5. In other thoughts, the Defenders dropped on Netflix last night. I stayed up to watch the first episode and was, well, kinda disappointed. The combo story has all the positives of the shows I enjoy and all the negatives of the ones that suck, only the suck is leaking into the non-suck in a very obvious way. I thought the infection might go the other way. It hasn’t

The more I study and write about virtual realities, the more I realize the concept is not much different than social realities. While we of the physical space occupy the same world, that world looks and behaves very differently based on social circles and economic class. What we do and how we view the concept of ‘living’ shifts as you move through the various social circles. This applies not only to what we do in life but how we use our leisure time, and that leisure tends to serve as a connection point between the worlds, furthering the illusion that we exist in the same space at all.

Take the example of a football game. There are many levels to the sport overall and even to the naming of the game. For example, if I say football in Spain, I’m talking about the beautiful game, known here as soccer. However, if we are speaking the same language and are even at the same football game, the experience shifts based on the socio-economic world you live in. These delineation are clearly outlined on your ticket stub. For those living within the wold of NFL teams and players, you are likely on the field or in a protected skybox where the way you interact with the game is separate from the various, financially delineated ways in which the crowd interacts with the game. If you are a worker you are experiencing the game differently again. While all of these people are in the same stadium, the way they view that environment (and thusly the way others view them) shifts from social circle to social circle. This is identical to the virtual realms–especially in terms of MMORPG where you do have these huge gathering halls and the people in the spaces have various roles and as such view the space in different ways. Technically, they are in the same space, but the reality of that space is very different.

I’ve become more and more aware of this through interacting with parents at morning and afternoon pickup. We all drop our kids off at the same place–an intersection of our realities–but afterwards we fall back into very different lives. The gathering halls of the bus stop and the virtual adventuring halls are very much the same beast.

Some Thoughts:

1. Starting to stash away cash for a VR rig for the kids. This blog is brought to you by Talislegger’s heedless ambition for tech…
2. I’m falling back into another world too. The world of productivity.

I am not a fan of the way our POTUS is running things, but I understand. Lets consider for a second who the man is: He is a relic of a bygone era who truly believes that America’s best times were when there was a clear sense of racial division and hierarchy. He is a man who is fiercely loyal to those who support him the most, and someone who will fight tooth and nail to defend his self-inflicted machismo and idealism. Sadly he is also someone fighting for a nation that does not exist and is unwilling to recognize the reality of what does exist. This is only highlighted by his inability to see alt-right as inherently bad vs. defined by it. If defined by anything it is defined by his ad hoc creation of the alt-left boogie man and dogged belief in an idea of a leftism that doesn’t really exist.

In other words, he is a man that sees antifa as a name of a terrorist organization vs. the idea of anti-facism being something that we should all be rallying behind. He isn’t the leader we need. However, he is the leader we have and that isn’t going to change for a while. So, what do we do while he is here?

I’d say the more central-thinking individuals we turn away from his stink the better. There is a certain amount of comfort in the ideas of white oppression. It is a convenient excuse for those who have no other solid foundation for why things are bad in their lives. It is a message that (like most republican rhetoric) targets a poor and disenfranchised audience that wants to believe they have the same chance as any other hard worker to become a billionaire. These are the people who see Trump as a ‘common man’ or ‘working class leader’ while the reality is that he comes from extreme wealth and only ever pays lipservice to their needs. What happened with his pledge to bring back coal is case and point of that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Those were just some anti-Trump thoughts swirling around in my brain that needed to find an outlet. I am constantly amazed at how much a presidency reflects where the nation thinks it is at. Obama’s presidency marked the ‘end of American racism’ while Trump’s marks the ‘normalization of white rage.’ Both are exaggerations.
2. The beam approaches. Less than a week now.

Funny how the random links that appear at the bottom of articles can sometimes be the path to enlightenment. This one came courtesy of the cancer center website, which appeared (for some strange reason) at the bottom of a digital spy article about the upcoming season of The Defenders. The article focused on the five forms of intimacy. I perked up, because I have a predilection towards one form of intimacy, meaning I could be missing out on 80% of the loving! Turns out, I’m not entirely. However, I was missing out on a wealth of emotional understanding.

The five forms, according to the article, are emotional, intellectual, experiential, spiritual, and of course, sexual. Physical touch is one of my two primary love languages, thus the sexual form of intimacy is prominent. What really caught my eye here though were the twin headlights of spiritual and intellectual intimacy. Having a sense of a connection beyond the physical always means something to me. Soon we will be under the beam of a full eclipse, and I won’t be with my partner at that moment. That is a reflection of spiritual separation, Ka pulling us in different directions. That matters. By understanding that I recognize now how much the spiritual matters in building a loving and lasting partnership. I don’t believe I’ve ever had that in a long term relationship.

The intellectual intimacy is one I often overlook. The sharing of ideas and the trust to be open and honest about one’s intellectual passions is a rare gift. I share that and we develop ideas together. This is a vital form of intimacy that I believe I have taken for granted. What is seen cannot be unseen, and that is a good thing.

So, there are five areas to work on in intimacy. Time I got to work.