10 Minute Rule

Its no secret that I’ve been a missing man in my professional life this semester. It didn’t catch my attention so much as it did when the Black History Month planning committee put out an email and I wasn’t on the mailing list. I’ve been really gone, man. I pulled a Ralph Ellison. I pulled a John Cena–you can’t see me on my campus. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. For anyone to continue performing at the level I was for a sustained period there needs to be a significant break period, or recharge, with the singular goal of giving the worker a chance to step away from the level of responsibility and expectation in order to renew a sense of vigor.

Economists talk about the 80/20 rule, in which 80% of the work tends to be completed by 20% of the people. This winds up being true of most work situations (and beyond!). I tend to be a twenty percenter. It takes a toll. Moreover it surprises people when you pull back and do less. It feels like suddenly you’re doing nothing. Doesn’t feel that way to me of course. I’m writing a novel, amongst other projects, coaching multiple football teams, teaching/learning, and teaching all kinds of stuff.

Still, I did-am doing less.

This minivacation of sorts renews me and fills me with that sense of professional urgency that has been lacking as of late. In other words, I’m just about ready to remind the world why I rock.

I just about believe I do again.

Taking a break from Bob today. It has been that kind of day overall. I’m tired and more than a little drained. I’ve had some time to reflect about perceptions, about the concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, happiness and satisfaction. All of this swirling around my life like an unwanted halo. I’m constantly drawn to the Steinbeck quote:

“when I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.” John Steinbeck

It applies to how some people live life and, in many ways, the way I’ve contemplated living life. This isn’t necessarily a happy development. As my mother in law put it, ‘You think you’re happy with the choices you make but then you’re only happy 20% of the time. The other 80% is sadness.’ Without trying to sound like a person who is morbidly depressed (which I’m not, btw) I can explain that I’m someone who is at a crossroads in life. I’m still trying to figure out the best path to happiness.

People can be happy in a number of ways and for me it comes down to figuring out the things that make me least happy and eliminating them from my life. Afterwards I can start to think beyond the next day and regain the perspective of a long and satisfying life plan.

A lot of this sounds like a jumbled mess today. That’s probably why this is one of those blogs that won’t be sold…

 

(continued from yesterday)

Bob was married once. He’d done his undergad six at Southern Methodist. Being neither Southern nor Methodist, the dating pool was limited to other ex-pats like himself. One such ex pat was blonde with big green eyes and a crooked smile. Bob was smitten. He kissed her on the fourth date and proposed half a year later. Lana was his sacred cow. Even after the cheating allegations became a joke whispered between his friends, after the second child looked more like his Post-grad Humanities professor than him, Bob loved Lana. Then one day she decided she no longer loved him.

It took Bob a few years to come around after that disaster. He graduated, wandered around Dallas for a few years, lived with friends. Eventually a job caught hold of him and his friends rediscovered their faith in the kind of man Bob could be. So, when met Diego’s eyes and saw that flicker of uncertainty, he said. “We can do this.”

Bob never did anything half-ass. In the morning he went to bodybuilding.com and typed in ‘best protein powder’. The muscle heads had a lot to say about protein. He went to the pharmacy and loaded up a few tubs full of protein and supplements. Then he called Diego and told him the plan…

Bob could trace his dramatic weight gain back to a bet.

It happened the Thursday after Halloween. He was at a bar with Diego and Finn. ZZ Top hammered out of the old jukebox so loud that the peanut shells on the ground shook. The Redskins game was on. Diego and Finn sat to either side of him each cradling a long necked beer. Bob wasn’t a beer drinker then. He’d come and sit with his guys and nurse a tumbler of rum and coke for close to an hour. When the drink got so low and old that the ice cubes looked like tiny o’s and the last wisps of alcohol were so joined with water as to be tasteless, he’d tilt his head back and clear the glass in one swish.

Diego said, “I’m done with women.”

The hints of a joke played at Finn’s mouth but Bob jumped in before his friend started something that could only end one way. He said, “That thing with Sarah wasn’t about anything, man. She just not into skinny dudes is all.“

Finn was still fighting for that joke. He said, “Yeah, dudes like Bob—skinny in all the wrong places.”

Diego laughed, his shoulders rolling with the effort. Bob laughed too and slapped Finn on the back. He ordered another rum and coke and winked at the bartender as she went away.

“You really think that’s true, man?” Diego said. “About the weight I mean. You think if I bulk up I’d get more chicks.”

The drink came and the bartender waited for Bob to taste it. He took a long sip, watching her as he did. She smiled and he smiled right back, adding a wink for emphasis. She shook her head and walked away.

“You know, it couldn’t hurt. You see it in all those magazines. Girls like the muscles. Hell, it could even make you healthier to slap on a couple of pounds.”

Finn said, “You guys are full of crap. Girls don’t buy into that stuff. They want hot guys and guys who have money. All that muscle stuff is for football players and those, what do you call them, Chickendell guys?”

Bob snorted. “Chippendales, and I don’t think those guys have any trouble with getting chicks—if they want chicks I mean.”

They all had another laugh at that then Finn turned on his stool, dipping his index finger in and out of the mouth of his beer bottle. He said, “Prove it. Hundred bucks says if you to put on, say, 20 pounds, you wouldn’t be able to get a girl to look at you, less go on a date with you.”

Some Thoughts:

1. Ten minutes were up, so I couldn’t finish it. I think I’ll continue it tomorrow….

For months now I’ve been puzzling over the idea of a single class. This is a class I’ve never taught before with a population that is so mixed in level as to be unrecognizable as a single class. I loved it for the first few weeks. The raw energy that came out of these conversations was enough to power me through the difficult early weeks of the semester. None of my other classes matched this level of passion. Yet that passion wasn’t sustainable. It felt like the age old story of the torch that burns too bright only to flame out too early. Once the class flamed out and the weight of the content sank upon them, the class took up another meaning in my head: Massive failure.

I have a tendency (one that must be corrected) to base my class around the level of the mean. The kids who represent the average student level get the attention. In worst case scenario (which is where I am) the kids who are the lowest are the ones who dominate the class and content. This is where I go wrong. This is where I went wrong this semester and continue to struggle. I mentioned in an earlier blog that this course steals more of my passionate energy than all of the others combined. This problem is exacerbated by the level of content not at all being congruent with the level of the course. I’m asking students to digest, understand, and interpret the entire history of the African American literary diaspora in 17 weeks. I am asking this of kids whose english and reading comprehension skills range from developmental to advanced. Moreover their specific attention spans are limited to fully engaged.

The important lesson I’ve taken away from the class is this: don’t teach it till you’re ready. I wasn’t and the result is obvious. I let my tendencies make a bad situation worse and the result is a class I’m not that pleased with. In other news the rest of the semester is incredible and uplifting in many ways. I’m ready to be the teacher I can be.

I am also ready to be the writer I can be.

Just finished watching Interstellar, the nightcap to one of the longest days in recent memory. The day started around 6 AM and pounded relentlessly until, well, now. The last part was the sugary stuff. Christopher Nolan’s space-time epic is one of a few to actually get a bit of the science right. Neil deGrasse Tyson even tweeted a bit of praise about the handling of space-time. He blasted several other things about the film, but that’s just how he rolls.

How I roll is to dig into the story and uncover what human elements lie beneath. This is largely where I think the film goes wrong. At the root, Interstellar is a film about the relationship between a father and daughter and the abandonment issues that string them together like a spider’s web. That relationship is sensible and feels real–as do the majority of connections in the film. Where the film dims a bit is the character of son, who is basely performed by Casey Affleck.

The film sells the father-daughter relationship, but the son is left to toil as an unimportant and largely forgettable character who is, at one point, villainized. I am given to believe that the director’s cut will explain more of that storyline. I hope I’m correct. In the meanwhile, I just enjoyed a great movie that left me thinking about the relative nature of time and about the way I think about family relationships.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Not surprisingly, children’s opinions hinge on those who they highly respect. Two of my boys are now Obama haters. One because his teacher bad mouthed the prez and the other because his brother aped the teacher. I get where she is coming from–disappointment with the ‘handling’ of Ebola–but you cannot blame every mocked up crisis on one dude. Obama followed the CDC’s lead–as he should and even went a step further and hired a Washington insider to help the doctors navigate the politics of the press and of the city itself. Too bad she didn’t get it, because now my kid thinks Obama is a bad president.

From dawn well past dusk I was a dad.

I’m a dad every day and I love every day that I get to be a father to my children, but today was really a chance for reflection and understanding. Moms get it. When you are a mom you have that role full time. You sleep and rise to the cadence of your responsibility. This has been the case for me for quite some time. Today was different. I’m used to the full time role on weekends and breaks and long hot summers. Today was a midweek dad day where the entire universe was made up of boy.

We began the day a little past dawn. I remember waking up to the roar of boys playing some manner of game downstairs. It was 6 AM. I joined them (reluctantly) and we hung out for a few hours before I started getting things together for our Veterans Day kids flag football game. That isn’t really a thing–at least it wasn’t until today. We got together a lot of the kids we play soccer with and got them ready for flag football. We had a game with kids from 5-14 and it was a fun and tiring defensive battle than ended in a 7-0 win on a pick-6.

Here is what I learned: I need a few minutes a day for me. I got 30 minutes today. Ten right now, ten I snuck by locking myself in my office to breathe, and ten I stole when the wife came home. It isn’t enough. Life is crammed with responsibilities, from the time you spend with your kids to your spousal time to you spend working or getting old work done. I need to create a life where I can enjoy my kids the way I love, but also have time to enjoy being with myself and enjoy being a writer.

The kids were staring in the sky. As I made my way towards the playground where the after school kids were gathered I turned my head towards the sky to see what they were looking at.

Dots.

It looked like 100+ white dots or aliens. I tried the alien angle with the kids (who didn’t know what that was) then the adults who giggled appropriately before reminding me of all the odd stuff we see coming from the local airbase. Nobody knew where the balloons came from. There was some speculation that they were launched from a nearby school or neighborhood, but nothing speculated made any sense. A brief moment that happened on a Monday.

Some Thoughts:

1. Something else that happened: I’ve started to notice a proliferation of homogenized black women on tv shows spending time with white men. This is a good thing in some ways. This makes black women more mainstream and thus eases the strain of being an outcast on that particular set.
2. On the other hand, that sort of thing is painfully stupid. So for a group to be accepted they have to show a willing partnership or subservience to the dominant group?
3. Or I could just be drained on a monday.

Jon Stewart recently poked fun at the media for acting like the democratic party is, well, dead and buried. He noted that the media used language identical to the language used two years ago when the democrats were the big winners and the republicans were, well, dead and buried. This “either or” binary media philosophy is really great for selling commercial space, but does little to explain the nuance and intricacies of life. Worse still, it creates an environment that victimizes people by pulling their situations out of context and placing those people into reference groups that also destroy the context of whatever acts/events the individual is being persecuted for.

I’m speaking about the infamous Vikings RB now.

AP plead out to a lesser crime over a situation that many deemed to be child abuse, but everyone questioned from that cultural area (Texas) believed was not child abuse. Contextually, I don’t see what happened as child abuse. That’s just my opinion. Legally, it was deemed not to be a child abuse charge–at least not one that the prosecutors thought they could win. Still, Peterson has not been reinstated. Why? The team isn’t sure how it will look.

In reality the team isn’t sure what story the media will tell. Now I can tell you from watching these types of binary stories that the media will say whatever they think the audience is tipped towards. Case and point, at the beginning of the Jets game I am watching as I type, the Jets were a broken team with no hope or desire to win in the locker room. As the J-E-T-S jumped out to an early 10 point lead and suddenly forced a turnover deep in PIT territory, the same announcer had the gaul to say that in the production meetings he felt the excitement building among the Jets in expectation of a win and a turnaround.

The media is a lie. The media is the lie they think you want to hear.

This is another one of those days where I don’t have a coherent message to share. In truth I have nothing at all to say, but with ten minutes on the clock I am going to have to ramble at the very least. So, avid readers of good blogs: Turn back now before you re lost to the wiles of senseless writing.

Are they gone? Good.

I’m watching ‘Sex Sent Me to the ER’ and I reminded of just how much bad TV still exists in our present reality. Days like this I wanna jam down hard on the reset button, release the zombie hoard, and try to find some lasting meaning in surviving the plague. Since I can’t do that I’m going to turn off my brain. Seriously, I’m not sure if the commercials or the show is more interesting, and that isn’t saying much.

At this point you are probably wondering why I continue to watch. Well, we do some of the things we do with our partners out of respect for our partners. Sometimes our partners do what they do out of a deep sense of boredom and disinterest–which is the way I tend to feel about most TV in general lately.

Books haven’t been that much better lately. I recognize that it is about what/who you read. My last read was In the Tall Grss by Stephen King and his son. The short was, well, short. It didn’t tell enough of the story (character or otherwise) to carry my interest. In this modern society the mainstream attention span is short and maybe that helped birth such a story, but it wasn’t enough…

 

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Motivation isn’t a static thing. It ebbs and flows in concert with your environment and situation. I need to find a better environment for motivation.
2. The myth that black men love plus sized white women is seeming less like a myth and more like regularly scheduled programming. What’s up with that?