10 Minute Rule

I spent some time today listening to Angela Maiers ted talk on people mattering to each other. Maiers reminds her audience that it is a simple step to remind people that they matter, but it is something that few of us bother to do. Why? Because often few of us realize or even reflect on our own mattering. I have some objections or reframing to those arguments. I believe most of us feel like we matter to someone. I feel like we don’t entirely recognize how or even that we matter beyond that tiny circle we define as either our family or our close acquaintances.

This blog is proof that I want to matter to someone outside of the handful of people who still love me. I write for ten minutes every day but I don’t have to publicize it. Today I reactivated the facebook stream that reminds people who are my facebook friends that I’ve said something. I did so because it is important to me that I matter in some sense. I am a writer and I don’t think you can be a writer–published or otherwise–and not want to matter to someone outside of yourself or small circle of friends.

Knowing that it is important that we know we matter is going to be a fundamental tenet of my class this semester, because I have noticed that people believe they matter especially less during voting season. I hope to change that philosophy for them and for these students to go out and change that philosophy for someone else.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to build a Juggs machine. I’ve been trying to figure out a lot of things lately. I feel like the people who know how to build stuff are better off financially and perhaps feel happier and more accomplished. Do-it-yourself is the pre-maker’s movement. Learning how to do things you’ve never done before shows the elasticity of the brain and keeps you feeling relatively young. The key here is relative.

Some Thoughts:

1. First scrimmage of this young tackle football season. Our starters are ready but our newer players are not close. This is worse on the tiny mite team where the lack of talent is really glaring. I wish I knew how to help with that one.

11.11: I woke last night around 2 AM, barely thirty minutes after I originally went to sleep. My youngest was standing in my doorway, wanting to crawl into bed and into the comfort of family and safe, warm, space. Something about the moment terrified me. It wasn’t so much the surprise of him standing there as it was a memory of my own youth and the terror that evening often brought. I was-am-afraid of dying. It isn’t the part after you are dead but the moment itself when you see yourself slipping away, as if someone opened a giant trap door into your life and everything below you is blackness.

What scares me most of all is the recognition of no longer being me–no longer having a sense of this life, loves, family. They will continue on in my absence and, in time, think of me only as a distant memory. I will not be able to see them grow old and love and find family and happiness. I mean, I know little about the hour of my death and could live to 100, but the idea of dying itself is terrifying.

I don’t think it is something you get over. You shelve it, pushing it deep into your sub conscious in the places it cannot be reached until that memory of fear is torn free to envelop you.

Some Thoughts:

1. Being this morbid is awful. This, along with the occasional lack of motor control and hallucinations are the hallmarks of a lack of sleep.
2. Dog has completely given up on peeing outdoors. Not good…

 

I’ve come to the conclusion that reality is fairly irrelevant. I didn’t think so at first, but the more I see what is happening around me the more I recognize the statement to be utterly true. From Trump’s fallacious ‘people are saying’ to the short-sightedness of people drawn to true/false based answers, the reality I deal with every day allows room for vast interpretation. Trevor Noah took a stab at this recently, comparing Trump to ‘the dress’ meme people couldn’t get away from. Is it gold? is it black? Well, reality is nuanced. We elected Obama under the understanding he would pull all troops out of Iraq and let them deal with their own shit. He did so and ISIS formed. Now we are blaming the man for ISIS and the “growing threat to US security” which is largely false.

No, Mr. Trump, Obama did not found ISIS. What he did do was respond to the desires and will of the American people–a will that shifted into ‘why did you leave?!” mode once we got out and shit got real. In other words, he did what is about to happen with the Brexit. I bet they’ll blame that one on David Cameron. I bet he quit to dodge that exact bullet.

Welcome to the 2016-17 football season. I have officially done nothing to prepare for the upcoming fantasy season. I haven’t watched football players above the age of 11 in quite some time and let me tell you the complexity of NFL (even college) offenses is getting me pumped. I coach in a youth tackle league and see a whole lot of wing offenses ranging from the traditional T to doubles to Wing/Pistol hybrids. All of it is designed to get a speedy little dude out in space and doing work. Now that has my juices flowing for the pro game because there are more options available to offensive coordinators and more opportunity for mismatches and–in the preseason especially–for a young nobody to pop off and score three TDs. Watch this season for a handful of dudes you never heard of or straight forgot about to make an impact. This is especially true because of the number of suspensions and injuries ravaging the sport. Even Brady is in the pen for 4 weeks.

So, what do I have by way of predictions? I’ll start with my beloved Jets. They picked up yet another 2-back near the end of his prime. This one is as versatile as the ersatz Ladianian Tomlinson or moreso. Now while many thought this LT would be a shell of his former self, being so close to the end of career, he turned out to be not ersatz at all, but a legit #1 option for the Jets. This trend will continue and the Bears will be crying into the loss column, pissed they screwed things up so badly.

The Giants don’t have a definable run game. They do have a legit second option in the pass attack and barring another recovery setback, a third as well. Expect Macadoo to open up the passing game in vintage Manning style and work the ball downfield as a way to clean up the edges and free up running room for whoever totes the rock.

That’s it for the opening edition of 2016-17. More to come in a week.

This post doubles as an argument to my ENG 102 research writing students. On the first day–week even–I like to acclimate them to the classroom setting and to the idea of what we are trying to achieve here. I don’t teach them how to research in the traditional sense. Most of them operate google the way a landscaper operates a mower. They have that blunt force knowledge of how to get the information that they want. I want to turn them into precision instruments that know how to shape that data into something convincing.

Research writing is argument writing. Everything is about trying to convince the reader to listen to and understand your point of view. Even the more ‘exploratory’ writing meets this claim. Exploration of ideas in a paper is about you telling me what you learned and supporting that learning through carefully crafted statements about how this thing can mean what you say it means. So, what then am I teaching? How to insert that research into a context. How to create context and manipulate it to meet your ends. The research is the icing on this cake of convincing that you as a writer are doing. For example, Mark Bowden wanted people to see the Pablo Escobar assassination in a particular light, so he wrote Killing Pablo. We will read that book and dissect the argument and evidence chapter by chapter to uncover how he created the perception that he did.

later the students will learn to model those strategies and apply them to their own writing. Oh what fun!

Some Thoughts:

1. Football is coming…
2. Trump is suggesting that someone take Clinton (known to the Secret Service as Evergreen) out. He called on his second amendment people to handle it. Then he later suggested that he did no such thing. How he continues to behave like the shitty college kid who does something wrong and knows you cannot prove it continues to baffle me.
3. Trump’s Secret Service nickname is Mogul. His wife is Muse. In contrast Obama is Renegade and the first lady is Renaissance. Mrs. Clinton is Evergreen and President Clinton is Eagle. There’s a joke in there if you look closely.

My girlfriend asked me about my father today. I mentioned that I didn’t have one and she reminded me that I did. I suppose she is right. I’ve had three fathers in my life. One by blood, one by bond and one by marriage. The first I didn’t even know until the second died. I knew of him, the way you know about legends or things that go bump in the night. He existed on the fringe of things and I was terrified of who he could be. He wasn’t a terrible man, just a cold one. I like to think of myself as a warm and loving soul. I got that from my father by bond. He was the man who loved my mother; the man who raised me. He died when I was twelve and I grew up a little then. I think that all kids who are asked to grow up early are in some ways arrested at the age of their ascension. Those who know me would agree I am eternally twelve. If there is a heaven and we are sent back to that perfect age I believe it would be twelve and in the months before he took ill and left us forever.

My third father was my then wife’s step-father. I loved him and respected him. I wanted to have him move in with us and live here and grow old under our care. If my dad taught me how to be loving then her dad taught me how to be strong. It is a lesson I came into late in life and one I carry with me to this day.

All three men meant something different to me. They carried aspects of what it means to be a dad. I believe I carry a great deal of what they taught in me today. I try to give it to my kids, to show them how to be men, to love, to be strong, even to be feared or at the very least to fear me. All of this is what I took from them. Now that I am no longer married my ex will find a new love and the boys a second father. I hope what they gain from him is a kind of strength I haven’t given them. I hope it is good and pure and filled with the possibility of a better world and being better people.

I also hope it isn’t half as cheesy as I am.

I missed the HOF game tonight. Everyone did. They decided to call the whole thing off after the field conditions sucked due to rubberization of paint. That is to say the field conditions led to a cancellation of the start of the pre season. This is the state of a professional sport in a country that proclaims itself quite loudly to be the best in the world–largely on the backs of private industries such as the NFL. I don’t think there is much more to be said on this issue. My own preseason as a coach starts this thursday as I watch the mid kid take his new role as running back on his mitey mite team. That ought to be fun and somewhat terrifying at the same time.

There are a dozen threads of information streaming through my head as I write this and I can never seem to hold on to more than one at a time. I was thinking about football and now I’m back on movies–suicide squad’s failure to be specific, which leads me to think about how Ghostbusters simply vanished from our awareness after much ado about what turned out to actually be nothing.

Unto the upcoming semester, which approaches with the speed of a locomotive. I find myself still terribly unprepared as I am still cleaning up the detritus of summer. i gotta get there soon though, because I am almost out of time.

I’m fully out of time here.

Elliot, lead protagonist of Mr. Robot, is crazy. Hannibal Lecter is crazy. Howling Mad Murdock is–well I don’t quite know for certain. He reminds me of Corporal Klinger. The portrayals of crazy as a protagonist go on and on, with each adding its own twist on what it means to be crazy and thus what it means to be sane. This weekend’s blockbuster brought us inside the mind of Harley Quinn, lover of the once great Joker. Quinn is played by Margot Robbie who does an excellent job sexualizing the character to the point of super-objectivity. She is a playmate with a hammer and a desire to tease every man she comes across. She is also completely insane, being driven beyond objectable reason by the Joker.

We see this story unfold in a series of disjointed flashbacks, reminding us of how she became to be who she is, and alluding to some sort of super powers discovered in the milk of an Ace Chemicals vat. A vat she dove backwards into during a moment of total surrender to purple and crazy. This chick, however, has redeeming qualities and goals and seems relatively human. I think that is how we are doing crazy different now. Crazy is fixations and voices and behaviors that belong to people who are otherwise categorized as normal. What has changed the most is that we are seeing directors work to rationalize and contextualize the crazy–at least when it comes to protagonists.

Change is good. Suicide Squad still isn’t.

There is definitely chemistry in play between fading ‘it’ girl Margot Robbie and once great action star Will Smith. Sadly, her star burned bright and fast while his fades slowly. He dodged the Independence bullet (his wife should have dodged the Bad Moms bullet) but caught one clean here in Suicide Squad. I don’t really know what to think about the film yet. I know that I enjoyed it in spurts and laughed at it in others. Clearly the editing team and David Ayers were split on tone and story here. However, I can say that in this disjointed mess of a movie were moments of clear and powerful inspiration.

Cara Delevingne is a chameleon. The chick I saw in Paper Towns is completely gone, replaced by a poised, strangely sexual being rippling with possibility. She shone in moments throughout the film–right up until the director made her dance suggestively and speak in tongues. Sorry, The Exorcist really cornered the market on that act. Smith was smooth and transparent as Mike Lowrey–I mean Angry Steven Hiller–I mean Floyd ‘Deadshot’ Lawton. He cracked jokes, moved the plot along, and struggled internally with being a bad guy. The chemistry between he and Robbie is palpable and leaves room for future work between the two, but those characters are the least interesting of the film–despite all the focus.

Ten minutes goes too fast, but next post I will dig into the portrayal of females in the film overall (very two-choice), plot, and touch on where the DCU could be heading with all of this.

Some Thoughts:

1. Walked out of the movie and right across a Spice Girls video: Mama. What ever happened to the Spice Girls? I know one of em married Beckham, but that shouldn’t signal the end of your career–just the end to your need for personal income. The girls showed up at the 2012 Olympics to do a number, but that was it. Four years later… What does Rio got on the Spice Girls?