10 Minute Rule

I had a chance to watch the Edward Snowden interview with John Oliver. Since I only have ten minutes I have to be a reductionist. I see his argument as, ‘Americans should not be spied upon and the NSA should only spy on outside threats.’ His argument is more nuanced than that and he goes on to argue that we have a right to know exactly how much we are being surveilled. I agree with him in that aspect, but I do so knowing that I likely should not have a huge say in controlling that.

In the John Oliver interview it became clear that people care about privacy when it comes to petty things like dick picks. Oliver called it a visible line in the sand. So based on his argument (which I agree with) we care about surveillance when it applies to us and don’t want to be watched. We don’t care about surveillance when it applies to people we have no contact with or when we can logically process the need for that surveillance to happen. It is a terrible double standard that we continue to perpetuate in this misguided effort for and understanding of safety.

I am all for safety. I am all for security from foreign threat.I just recognize that threats come from within and that those are far more dangerous than anything outside of the ‘hard protective shell’ of Amurrica.

Some Thoughts:

1. Three things happened in America in 1796 that I found incredibly interesting. We got an elephant from India, started a black church, and
2. Despite the fact that collegiate athletics seem akin to modern slavery in many ways, I still want my kids to have the opportunity to explore the relationships and excitement that come with college athletics. I just hope the slavery part comes into national focus before then and people start to recognize how messed up college athletics really are and fix the problem.

New week, new start, evolving attitude. I’m one step closer to disconnecting from cable entirely and limiting one of my major vices. Life changes when you allow it to happen and for me it does slow quite slowly (and usually once I’ve removed the detritus of bad habits like hours of TV). Of course I’m writing this as a show streams on netflix. The real question is am I reducing a vice or just making it more financially manageable?

Change is an important thing and something I cant entirely plan out. I can create (continue to create) a path to being a more idealized version of myself but the real work of the experience is dealing with the obstacles that exist and discovering the obstacles I make for myself.

Turns out there are a lot of those…

Some Thoughts:

1. Still binge watching Kimmy Schmidt Season:1. I must admit I’d lost all faith in the ability of sitcoms to be even remotely entertaining. ‘One Big Happy’ represents the average crap and ‘New Girl’ represents the dying breed. Kimmy is better than both with excellent guest spots from stars of all kinds, including producer Tina Fey (you’ve been missed).
2. Fire destroyed 1/3rd of Copenhagen back in 1795. It is hard to imagine that something of that sort could happen in modern times, though something like that happening would make an incredible premise for a short story and possibly even a novel.

I’m borrowing from Ice Cube here, but the sentiment is legit. I finally got to watch one of my boys play tackle football. He only carried the rock one time and scored a 30 yd TD. That’s enough for me right there, but we followed it up with an easter interlude (very brief egg hunt-styled excitement), Subway sandwiches, and a Diamondbacks game.  I’m sort of a big kid when it really comes right down to it, so after all the excitement we watched the kid-version of a parkour action flick, and then I sent the kids to bed so I could binge watch the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

I’m completely aware of the loss of man card here.

Some Thoughts:

1. Kentucky got beat. MSU got whipped badly. I’m not sure I entirely care. In truth my aptitude for college basketball fell off the charts after the Cyclones exited (in the first round). I’m not afraid to admit that I stop caring about certain things once my teams depart…
2. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794, but he didn’t event it himself. Legend has it the work was done by a slave named Sam who was looking for a way to ease his workload. Two ways we can look at this. 1) something good came out of slavery 2) folks have been taking credit for other people’s hard work for nearly the entire history of our country…

James Wan tried to make me cry. I’ll admit that I’m not the manliest man to begin with. I often cry during Casablanca. However, those tears are triggered by the meaning I pour into the film, the history of when and why I first discovered it and some legit acting across the board. Bogart is the real deal. Paul Walker is not. His death was tragic and very much in the vein of the Fast & Furious franchise, so that sucks. Still, I never much liked or respected him as an actor. That is why it pains me to recognize that James Wan go so deep into my head that I was choking up in the last ten minutes of Furious 7. I hate you James Wan. I kind of adore you too.

Furious 7 is not a good movie. It is a pretty collection of over-the-top stunts wrapped around a paper thin and barely followable plotline like a pig in a blanket. The premise of the story is that the villain from Fast 6 had a older bad ass brother. To prove just how bad ass they cast Jason Statham and made his first scene one where he is talking to his laid up bro (not dead–that spells sequel or spin off with the Rock). As the camera pans out we see the big bro has just whupped an elite SWAT platoon’s ass and destroyed the hospital just to get to his bro. He did this alone, mind you.

Thus begins the wild senseless action porn that is Furious 7.

The movie was a fun and fairly useless ride, but in the last 10 minutes the director, James Wan, comes to life with a poignant tribute to Paul Walker that doesn’t even make sense in the context of the senseless film, but really yanks deeply at the tear ducts and calls forth a stream of wow. See it, just for that.

Some Thoughts:

1. George Washington gave the shortest inauguration speech in American history back in 1793. This was the same year the first US Hot air balloon was launched, coincidentally the last time on record an American president wasn’t full of hot air.

I was at a workshop this morning enjoying the stylings of Myrlin Hepworth and I noticed how immature the students in the back of the room were. I started making attributions, remembering the ‘type of students’ that sit in the back of the room and thinking about maturity vs. immature behavior and really considering why students would act in this fashion. Let me begin by saying that I don’t teach high school. I’m a college professor and with that comes a built in set of expectations of student behavior. Of course, those expectations are shadowed by another set of expectations–the expectation that students are going to remain immature children who will create any opportunity to make the class stupid and rather pointless–in other words, they will create a reality that mirrors their concept of what class is.

I’m struggling between the two divergent sets of expectations. The standards are in fact a spectrum. On the one end you have immaturity. On the other hand you have understanding and commitment (perhaps misnamed). Two students showed up 30 minutes after the session began. These are the behaviors of children and children experience life (generally) in a carefree ‘in the moment’ sort of fashion. I don’t know that I entirely dislike that but I am working to appreciate it and to understand what it means.

To hear it from other instructors that immaturity comes from a lack of appreciation of the subject, from boredom, from an inability to connect with the material being shared, from nervousness, fear, apprehension, sometimes even as a direct result of the growing awareness that they are entering a world of responsibility and are utterly unprepared for that. This last impression of meaning stems from watching students live lives within the boundaries of everything they already know–in other words they never explore the world outside of the reality their parents created for them.

Maybe that’s okay. It isn’t okay for me or even for my job and role on this earth. My goal in life is to get people to realize that there is more–that they actually want more, which is often why I focus on the ones who are so limited and why so often they are the ones who piss me off the most.

Some Thoughts:
1. 1792 was the first year the USA celebrated Columbus Day. Thus began the indoctrination of a lie. I speak of it on the eve of another lie–the like of Easter. What is Easter supposed to represent? Easter predates the resurrection of Christ as does the tradition of Easter eggs (representing the struggle between good and evil) and the idea of resurrection as embodied by the Phoenix. None of this has anything to do with a bunny either, so what the heck are we celebrating?

It may take a bit to get to the point here. I have a lot of thoughts swirling around on this topic and as I write the facts and ideas coalesce into something meaningful. I think I’m starting to understand why people get so angry about concepts like gay marriage.

I was working with Myrlin Hepworth today and he was reminding my students about the difference between concrete and concept. As he talked it triggered a swirl of thoughts in my head. Love is a concept. Belief is a concept. Marriage is concrete. The Bible is concrete. These things are houses for what are essentially indefinable concepts. When I think about the idea of love and communicate that with figurative language I relate love to the concrete things and actions I define as love-related. Someone else may have the same conversation and pick a separate set of relational objects. One thing we are both supposed to agree on is the Universal Language of Marriage.

This is where things get tricky.

For a large portion of the religious population, marriage is defined by the bible (a concrete house for belief/faith) as the love-based binding of one man and one woman. Marriage then appears to be the concrete house for both love and faith for these people. On the other hand, people like me believe in marriage as the concrete house for love alone. There is no added component—no roommate named faith associated with that. As such, the idea of marriage between two men or two women is just marriage and doesn’t pull a big bad wolf on my house in any way.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watched my son mail-in a practice today. He was very much the Allen Iverson of practice and this reflects negatively on him in the eyes of the coach. It reflects negatively on me as a dad who is supposed to prepare his kid and a coach who is supposed to expose his players to athletic rigor Clearly none of this surfaced tonight. Instead I watched a kid who was obviously checked out in the days leading up to his first home game. Speaking of that game, I can almost check ‘watch my kid play a tackle game’ off the bucket list. Everything following is about him and his (apparently limited) desire to play the sport. I didn’t (consciously) push him into it and I refuse to push him to continue if his head isn’t in the game. Then again, maybe he’s just having an off night.
2. Napolean Bonaparte was elevated to commander in chief back in 1791. Earlier that year the Big Bottom Massacre in Ohio kicked off the Northwest Indian War. Rough year.

I had the opportunity to sit with a woman who was openly ranting about her husband fearing for his life and being discriminated against largely based on his race and his profession. I felt for her in the early moments of her rant. Then she dropped a bit of privilege and reminded us that we shouldn’t be discrimnating against him, because he’s a white cop. She went on to suggest that it wasn’t just affecting him but his entire family–especially her having to be a wife standing up for her man and fearing for his safety when he walks the streets. I thought to myself, what a strong moment here. This woman has a chance to finally feel like what it means to walk through the world with brown skin, or with a Koran cradled in your arms, or to be from a part of Korea no one wants to speak proudly about, or wanting to have sex with someone who has the same parts as you. Unfortunately–and realistically–it mattered more to her because it was about her and someone she loved and it was about someone and something she always group up thinking was the ‘right thing’ and had the identity of the majority and was something to be believed in. I thought, isn’t it ironic that the people I mentioned above all likely felt just as badly about their experience as she did about hers? I’m willing to bet that not one of them identified as being the ‘bad guy’ either, and also like her, complained about how mass media is driving the interpretation of their group. Too bad she didn’t seem to realize that.

1. Georgetown College was founded in 1789, 102 years before basketball was invented. 226 years later they suck at basketball.
2. That was also the year we named Washington our first US President.
3. Later that year Kentucky rolled out the first bottle of Bourbon Whiskey. The correlation is obvious. From the first ‘crowning’ of an American president we’ve been driven to drink some hard shit…especially when thinking about basketball.

I’ve been thinking about moments lately; thinking about the things I remember best–being down by the water with a loved one and feeling that tingle of a shiver, missing the turn on the way to a new location and realizing at once the promise of that future place. I can paint my entire life in moments. Some of these moments bring me pride, some pain, and all of these moments are how I register memory. I believe that one of the most important things in life are to create moments. As I slip deeper into the tech stream I’ve recognized that I often spend these potential moments recording them as moments vs. living them. Alongside that comes the realization that I sometimes speed through moments in search of what is going to be great next. I see that tendency in my kids as well, and that is unacceptable.

This all came to a head in my mind recently when I was thinking about today’s Wrestlemania event and how my kids are so excited about putting on costumes and parading into the house to watch the event and to have a moment to remember as part of their childhood. Today isn’t about pictures, its about memories and having a moment with my kids that we can remember forever.

Some Thoughts:

1. CNN’s preference for symphorophilia is problematic. They spend so much time focusing on plane crashes that they neglect all of the other stories that are out there in the world and important.
2. D.C. and Sierra Leone were both founded in 1788. Count this as another interesting historical coincidence given that one was founded as a seat of national government and the second was built as a location for freed slaves. Both wound up being extremely important in terms of our understanding and the international conversation about slavery. At the same time, both were immediately mired in corruption and strayed from the original purpose of the founding.

As the summer approaches and I ready for my creative writing and mythology courses I find myself drawn back into a web of fantasy an sic-fi writing that both thrills and annoys me. There are conventions I see in authors that help define genres in ways I enjoy and in ways that I detest. For example, Brett Battles, a noted post-apocalyptic thriller writer is as noted for his inability to create legitimate female characters. He uses the ‘As good as it gets’ method. In other words, he, thinks of a man and removes reason and accountability. This in turn creates a host of female leads that reflect badly on the genre and often alienate readers (that same chick he writes for every female character is super annoying).

In the same vein, the best fantasy authors tend to focus mainly on the same part of the fantasy world. Few write about Joe the cobbler. Many write about Prince Joe and his many devious friends. I am no different. My epic fantasy presently focuses on a series of characters adjacent to the crown. It is a milieu piece at heart, which attempts to show the life of the commoner by having characters who either came from those roots or masquerades as such. I’m disappointed in myself. I feel that I could just as easily tell the human story–the commoner tale–from the perspective of a commoner swept up in all of the crazy of the high society. In truth I’m better equipped from a knowledge standpoint to do so. I don’t almost entirely because everything else I’ve read has been about the people who ‘matter’ and there is a sense of trepidation about pitching a book about people who don’t matter.

Tropes run sci fi and fantasy. They run literary fiction as well, but it is more often viewed as a starting point, with the character story driving the value of the literary work. Hell, Jane Eyre is a trope built with tropes as building blocks.

I guess all this is to say that we need something new in terms of vision from the sci-fi and fantasy realms. Harry Potter was cute but it was just another coming of age story set against the backdrop of the out of place rich kid with skills in a school of established people. New is difficult. We’ve long operated on the premise that there are only seven basic plots and we multiply that by character, location, and perspective to create limitless tales. However, these tales aren’t limitless. It is time for an 8th and 9th plot. We need something new.

Some Thoughts:

1. Last night I was reminded of a valuable lesson: Sleep. Do it often and fruitfully. Without such machinations ones writing resembles the slow and random hacks of a monkey at play.
2. Monday I cut the cord. Bye bye DirecTv.
3. 1787 marks the publication of the Federalist papers in the U.S. This also coincides with the George Mason’s offering of a bill of rights (which was immediately and vocally shot down) and, perhaps more tangentially, when Arthur Philip launched his fleet of criminals towards Botany Bay in Australia–yet another British effort to rid the kingdom of undesirables and upstarts. I wonder why Australia never gained the traction USA did. On the other hand, perhaps Australia’s time is yet to come…
4. There is something to be said for waking to the howls of young children waging war over minutiae. They want to fight each other and it doesn’t matter what they fight over. The question is why?