10 Minute Rule

I allowed myself two hours of alone time today before the big sleepover (3+2 more kids = damn!) and spent the time with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson–at least on screen. I watched San Andreas and boy was it a good time. Though imperfect, the film had all the qualities of an action-first summer blockbuster with enough resonant story that the characters seem worth following.

The key points of a summer blockbuster tend to be action and name recognition driven. This has the Rock and Carla Gugino, but it also has appearances from a slew of known secondary actors. Paul Giamatti even plays a major role. It feels like they crammed every actor they knew into the film just to say, ‘earthquake!’

The storyline is simplistic: Dad loses wife and daughter, wife and daughter need him at a crucial time. Dad is there fir them. However, the narrative is really focused on the beautiful people and cinematography more than any deeper connections between characters. (Did I mention they cast Kylie Minogue in what could’ve been a memorable role but turned throwaway quickly)

Overall, I was looking for characters to get behind and great scenery on which to do so. This film had all of it.

 

I mentioned the other day that I was having a particularly tough time with this basketball season. That has not changed. The older team is dealing with a really rough transition to 10-12 ball. This happened in flag football as well. Basically, my 10 year olds are experiencing 10-12 for the first time, despite the fact that many of them are going to be 11 before year’s end. They are still raw and emotional. Two games in a row have been decided in the last seconds and both were losses. All games have been losses, much like flag football turned out (we did get the 1 win). 6-7 continues to be a different story, with all but one of our five games resulting in a win–usually a big one. Tonight was no different, a 27-4 thumping of a very good team with a coach I really like and respect. This isn’t a blog about winning though. This is about the moment a mom walked on the court and put everything in a dark and difficult perspective.

The mom in question is the same mom that wants her kid to feel like a superstar. On the surface there is nothing wrong with a kid feeling confident. Still, she bragged about him always being the best on a very bad team and was disappointed in the skill level of our team because her son didn’t stand out. I have a very different take on the boy. To me he’s a kid who is good enough to play with good kids and contribute. Being around better players will make him stronger as a player and give him a bit of a backbone and sense of reality. Regardless of the age group it is ridiculous to me to try to shelter a kid from the reality of their skill level and opposing competition. We aren’t going to put our worst kid on their superstar and say, “guard that kid” but at the same time we aren’t going to sit him until an appropriately sucky set of players takes the court so he can show out.

That is precisely what this mom demanded that I do.

She walked on the court and into the huddle as we are sending players out and said in front of his peers that he needed to be with the weaker players because he was getting discouraged. He looked at me half like she was crazy and half mortified. Not wanting her to make more of a scene, I benched him and let him come out with the subs. He did well–just as well as he had with the starters (of which he is one BTW) and when all of the bench kids came out of the game he asked to stay on and play with the “good kids”.

Clearly the mom was hovering around her kid trying to control his experience and make it the best possible experience for him. I respect that, but I don’t respect the way she did it or her inability to recognize that the kid wants and needs to grow. I can only suspect she’ll continue to do this and can only imagine that once he hits a level where the competition is much more intense (8-9 is that way) he will shrivel up and quit because of both how he was treated by her and equally not being exposed to a significant level of talent.

Sure, some players do get down when our top kids are on the court and everybody is asking for the ball, but that is all part of the learning process. You aren’t always going to be the MVP, but you are always going to have a chance to contribute to the best of your ability. That contribution is worth something, whether you are the star or the 12th man on the bench. No matter where you rank you are still part of the team and hiding from your natural role to try and pretend to be something you are not doesn’t boost confidence, it creates false bravado.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. 1884 was the year the United States adopted standard time. We didn’t do so because of any social convenience. It wasn’t about a unity pledge across the USA. No, our country adopted standard time in order to set proper schedules for the railroad. So you see, we’ve always been about business first and will remain that way ad infinitum.

One would think there isn’t a tremendous amount of football to be talked this deep into the offseason. One would be wrong. No less than two networks spend significant time talking up football. One speaks on the game 24 hrs a day. There are a few things to talk about. We can get into the prime time receivers showing that they are super athletes all around. As Gary is my witness, we’ve seen Odell Beckham Jr. do just about everything but practice as a receiver this year. According to my boys, he’s the “whip” guy. Yes, we watched him nae nae.

The beauty of the offseason (for most) is the belief that your team has a legit shot in the upcoming season. This is true of all sports–unless you are a NY fan and your team incorporates any sort of orange into their jersey. In that case you’re screwed Cubs style. In that case you name your youth teams after your home team just to see someone with that team name bust out a winning season.

I’m drifting off track. It must be the fatigue. Short post. It turns out there really isn’t a whole lot to say about football in the off season.

I  wrote this blog about what it means to be a kid and how it felt to enjoy this wonderful summer and grow closer to my boys. I wrote it for ten minutes and clicked the publish button only to watch my work disintegrate. Ten Minutes gone.

I’m not going to rant. Shit happens. Instead I’ll recap:

I spent the summer (so far) recharging my batteries and spending time with three hyperactive boys. We’ve played games and run around swinging lightsabers and firing foam bullets at each other all to the bass-driven soundtrack featuring Florida. I am having a great time. I don’t feel guilty about it, but I also don’t know how to explain the situation to grown ups who ask where my summer went.

My summer went to my inner child who was set free to roam amongst real kids and have a blast. He’s having a blast and I don’t think I’ll ever lock him up again. I think he’s got a seat in the control room now, alongside Picard and the strange Vulcan.

Some Thoughts:

1. Losing a blog sucks. Losing ten minutes of writing sucks, because I don’t make revisions. I put it out raw and, even if it sucks, it is still all me. Too bad its gone. On the bright side, I let the words out of me. They don’t necessarily need to be read by millions for me to feel like I’ve done my part.
2. Here’s something interesting I stumbled across… What if we are all part of the same energy stream and when we experience lives and those lives end, they are returned to the stream and anyone in the future who experiences past lives can experience those lives as part of the stream…

The package from Target arrived at my door on Thursday afternoon. A few days had already elapsed since the release of Batman: Arkham Knight and I was already afraid to scan the internet for fear of being lured into a freshly finished walkthrough. Instead a booted up the new PS4 and set off to become the night. In a matter of moments I knew that this game wasn’t going to be like Arkham City. This was going to be a beast of a different order.

I’m not much on spoilers, but I’ll say this: The story isn’t much on continuity. This Batman is a departure from the comic lore, as we saw in the previous incarnations. However, there are some inconsistencies here that rattled even my willing suspension of disbelief. Relationships are drawn in a way that is supposed to point back to the comic history and the books, but does so in a way that flips all of that on its head and recreates connections for us to build something new out of something old. All things considered, the new is slightly off putting. The same can be said for the characterizations thus far. The chip on Robin’s shoulder is starting to look like a medieval Pauldron and Nightwing has turned into a straight up Jackass. This isn’t to say I don’t like him or the game. I’m saying its different is all. Its like looking in a mirror and realizing the image across from you is wearing a different shirt.

The game can be frightening. There are moments when I said out loud: What the–! It sinks into your head and in the dark of the room you start to feel like you’re being transported to the bleak world of Gotham. Its definitely worth the visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I’ll settle for beating down baddies by the cab load in a fun and dynamic combat system that finally allows me to do tag team moves.

So, I got off on a bit of a rant yesterday about the staggering difficulty of coaching a handful of basketball teams through what is quickly devolving into a frustration-rich five-week season. I’m done with that rant. It distracted me from some of the real stuff happening in our country. Things like the confirmation of same-sex marriage as a right. Other stuff happened too. Donald Trump is officially in the race for president and the defacto Republican nomination leader, given the fact that Jeb Bush has not apparently declared his candidacy for reals.

While I like to think that my personal life and situation have some blog value I am aware that this other stuff is a much bigger deal. Here’s what I have to say about the Supreme Court ruling: Well done. I am a supporter of Gay rights, but that isn’t the reason I say well done. I say that because I am proud of the court for standing up for individual rights as opposed to enforcing discrimination. I get it: We are a Christian nation, separation of church and state aside. However, Christianity is open to interpretation and the basic tenet of that religion, IMHO, is love and not the letter of a text that has been retranslated and reimagined by a King who had his own agenda… I’m not trying to blaspheme here. I’m just trying to say that if God is love, lets let love fly.

As for Trump, he’s got his good points, but he’s also a dude that struggles to recognize that his words carry consequences. Just because he feels he can say something and has the backing of American firepower, doesn’t mean that another nation won’t feel the same way and won’t feel like they need to stand up for themselves. We have gone through a tough decade and a half of Anti-American sentiment across the globe. We need someone who wants to reverse that trend, not someone who may quite possibly make things worse in that regards…

Who am I voting for? I have no idea yet.

I’m only going to talk about youth basketball for a minute and then I’m going to get into some other stuff. Today all three of my boys played their games. The 6 yr old won his game but left feeling like life was basically about anger and spitting on things. The 8 and 10 yr olds lost and it was as much the fault of inconsistent refereeing as it was on bad coaching and kids just not fully being into the game.

I got a letter from one of my mom’s basically upset about the way the 6-7 yr old team was developing. A lot of focus was being placed on so-called star players and there was this rumor floating about that these stars had been playing together forever. I hate gossip. I hate it even more when it devolves into justification for why something you perceive to be happening is ‘happening’. Now the team in question does have an outstanding young player. I’d never met the kid before this year. He’s a superstar. One of the other so-called ‘Supers’ has been playing with my kid for a year or so, but with him size is his super power. That leads me to the allegation. No, I didn’t stack a six year old team. In fact we are young and inexperienced with a handful of players who know something about the game. Truth be told my kid, who was the star of the team last year, has been downright awful this season. That leads me to the truth behind the complaint. The mom in question admitted that her kid has always been the superstar of a bad team. He grew accustomed to being the go-to-guy and in this situation he’s JAK (Just Another Kid). It can be defeating for a kid to realize his stardom needs to be put in perspective. That’s what is up with her kid and mine.

In this game in particular my boy wound up guarding some aggressive kids who foul relentlessly. Not one for taking guff (the baby of the family must learn how to stand up for himself), he fought back and there were several scuffles throughout. That got him angry. Missing all of his shots pissed him right off. I cannot account for the bad shooting across the board on our team. We hit nearly everything in practice–even when being aggressively defended. Come game time the water spigot shuts off. Sahara Shots. Adobe brick homes laid at the feet of their opponents. Regardless, we rebound well and win a lot of games, so there’s that I suppose. I am more concerned about sinking attitudes and bad ball movement.

Which brings me to 8-9.

I didn’t expect a lot of wins. This is another young team–one that had never lost a game until this season. Five kids from the squad have been together for years and years. They know each other well but the skill levels are all across the board. These aren’t the globetrotters. We have a few Washington Generals in the five. We have a few more still on our 11 kid roster, with little by way of height. We took our first loss in week 2 and haven’t looked towards the win column since. The first two losses were by a combined total of 3 points. This latest loss was 7 points and to a team with a great deal more talent. We competed as expected. By the end of the year we should be back to form. Unfortunately that also means no basketball for another 11 months.

I won’t talk about the 10-12 game. Thats the one that got me riled. I’m not an angry person by nature, but I nearly completely lost my mind out there. It sets a bad example for the kids and for that thought alone I was able to hold it somewhat together, but what happened on the court was so beyond unfair that by the end we had at least 3 kids crying and three more ready to fight.

Tough day on the court indeed. I was supposed to get to more stuff, but ten minutes and all…

A good friend reminded me that this project is likely more for me than it is for them. Probably, but they don’t know whats good for them. They’ll love it when it is done. The loft aspect is what will make it fun. The loft effectively creates space below each bed to give each boy his own private space. I’m still working out how it is going to look and that is the basis of this blog. I’m stuck on the bed design.

Right now I’m considering a U shaped layout that allows for a bed on each of the three parts of the U and creates space above and below for privacy. My issues are numerous. There is the issue of the giant Snorlax  plush toy bed living below one of the beds now. This fun yet secondary bed is part of the room and part of the space. It has to live below the bed because there is no place else to put it. No matter which part of the bed it goes under, Snorlax effectively eliminates a private space for one of the boys, leaving two with spaces and creating yet another headache for me. This the becomes a project that causes problems and inequality.

So what is the solution? Right now the beds are merely wasted space and I want to be able to do something useful with that space. It may be that the three spaces are redesigned not as personal space but as purposeful space. Only, to what purpose?

The other major issue is height of the bed section. 30″ allows them to sit up for now. 37″ allows me to sit up. How high should a bed be?

Tonight was the NBA draft, a time of great hope and opportunity–unless you’re a Heat or a Knicks fan in which you know, respectively, the GM gives little value to draft picks or know your team will trade away the player they draft just as that player gets good. I would be the latter. I watch the Knicks draft in order to see who is going to be good on someone else’s team. Ask Lebron about that one. He had two Knicks starters–starters from THIS SEASON on his squad at the finals…

The Knicks thing kicked in immediately as they traded away 2013’s #24 pick for this year’s #19. Goodbye Tim Hardaway Jr. You were just starting to get good. That makes three starting guards dumped by the Knicks in the past 8 months. The #19 pick wound up being another guard who will probably find his skill set properly exploited in another offense–maybe Phoenix.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Fans of the Wayward Pines books will be deeply disappointed by the TV show. There are too many reasons to list. I mean, the stuff is not nearly as tightly woven and on message as the book. They should’ve done better for a mini-series.

It is easy to identify the balance in a relationship and easier still to recognize it as it tips further in one direction or the other. I, for example, recognize that I tend to see Wednesdays as a maintenance day and a prep day for when the kids come back on Thursday morning. My goal is for them to walk into something new and spectacular, be it something I’ve upgraded, some magical experience I’ve prepared for them, or something so small as a new game (see previous post on spoiling). As I’ve been thinking about how to get centered and get more productive, the idea of that balance keeps staining the air around me like used cat liter. There is the realization that my relationship with the boys is not balanced but there is also the understanding that it cannot be completely balanced. We are after all father and sons and not partners.

So what then is the necessary balance? I think in all relationships there has to be a basic understanding of needs of and from all parties concerned. For me there is an inherent need to please, so a lot of this stuff I do can be self-gratifying. On the other hand I need to feel like the things I do for people are appreciated in a way that I recognize as appreciation. This is made difficult in a parental relationship (though perhaps no harder than in a marital one) because the kids don’t fully understand my expectations of appreciation unless I explain it to them.

There’s the rub and the crux of this blog. I can, with difficulty, wrap my head around the fact that my boys don’t know how to act unless I tell them how. Therefore I can, and apparently sometimes do, tell them how they need to behave in order for me to continue providing them with a gleeful existence. What I recognize now is that it is much harder for me to separate my expectations of understanding from my grown up relationships. I don’t think I’m alone. I’ve heard far too often the term ‘he/she should know’ That term speaks to an inherent philosophy that one party has in some way intuited or even straight up told the other about desires and needs so much that the other party has ingrained this into their psyche. Unfortunately, this is often NOT the case.

I fear many relationships are torn apart by a failure to communicate and if we could all just reiterate what we want and need–without getting angry or defensive about the need to reiterate–a lot more relationships would be happy ones.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. A friend identified Banshee as male chick lit. I really like that term. It ought to be publicized…
2. 1876 (yes I’m back to that if only briefly) was the year of the famous Indian Head penny. It was also the year of the battle at little big horn. This feels important as we are considering putting a woman on the $10 in the same breath as we are rolling back abortion rights and continue to have less than equal wages.