10 Minute Rule

All the beauty of the World Cup (let’s ignore the socio-political drama of the thing for a moment and focus on the sport itself) has distracted me from my dogged pursuit of footballery. Through all of this round football I missed commentary about, perhaps, the most important moment in NFL offseason: Darelle Revis is now a Patriot.

This matters on so many different levels and is as epic as the releases of first Drew Bledsoe (in order to start a then unknown Tom Brady) and Peyton Manning being released (in order to draft and start an already known Andrew Luck). The Revis thing is different. Sure, the Patriots let go of a proven corner, but as with the Bledsoe situation, this is the Patriot Way. What makes this particular signing so special is that it pulls back the curtain to show us the ‘wizard’ is just a corporate beast. I’m not talking about Revis specifically. I’m talking about the entire business of football. As players often say, football is a business. Regardless of the emotion we fans put behind the ball, it is simply a business model that works more for the owners than the players. We as fans force this sense of loyalty on our players. However, the teams are rarely loyal to them.

The team sees the business end of things. I remember watching the great Jerry Rice forced to wear a Raiders uniform, because he wore out his usefulness in San Francisco. A lot of fans expressed anger over twitter (we can debate the value of tweeting something from beyond a digital chasm) with Revis’ choice to play for a bitter rival. I was pissed too–not because he decided to sign with them, but because they have him and he gets to torment NY QB’s for at least two games this year. I think that fear of Revis is at the core of everyone’s displeasure. However, the facts are this: New York didn’t want him and New England did. This is how business works. Unfortunately, we fans are wooed by the idea of legacy and retiring in the same jersey you first put on, as though the players have some responsibility to the company that isn’t in any way reciprocal.

I bring this up now because we are on the eve of decision 2.0 in the NBA. 4 seasons ago Lebron James was featured in a 1 hour special that culminated in him signing with the Miami Heat for a reduced contract. He took less money to play with the people he wanted to play with and for a shot to leave his mark. Mission Accomplished. 4 years = 4 NBA finals appearances and two rings. Now he has a chance to go 5 for 5 and maybe get a 3rd ring, but a lot of the media pundits are saying it is time for him to go home to Cleveland (as if he owes that team anything). LeBron doesn’t need to play for Cleveland. He does more than enough for the state, and has the right and the wallet to do what makes him happy. He is, in many ways, the opposite of Revis because of the nature of the game. Revis is a mercenary now. He needs to make max dollar, because there are so many brighter stars (in more regarded positions on the field) than him that he cannot make his billion off the field. LeBron can and he will–no matter what team he ends up on.

My money is still on Miami.

I finally sat down and watched Elysium. The film is 4 star according to the unknown (and unclear sourcing of) rubric on Direct TV. 4 stars might be a bit meaty, considering the clearly nutsoid actions of the secondary antagonist. Overall however, the film presented a rather sensible dystopian vision based primarily off the ‘corporate = affluent’ model of future thought. In some ways it is an ode to Ayn Rand, whose seminal work spoke of the great minds of the world going on strike and retreating from the common world. That is what happens with the government and ultra-rich in this story. They retreat  from the world–literally. They move to a fixed orbit space station that affords them all the pleasures of a perfect earth while the rest of the people suffer planetside.

The plot of the story moves us quickly between earth and space, building a larger socio-political message arou[nd what essentially is a love story gone awry. I enjoyed the action and the pacing, but the dynamics between the characters were limited at best. The ‘love’ story is told through flashbacks that center on a mother figure and a quote–a moment in time–that seems somewhat meaningless to the general plot. At the same time, the visuals, reminiscent of District 9, are very powerful and help to cement what is a weak character story dipped heavily in a very interesting world.

 

The beauty of teaching is that you get the entire gamut of students, from long time readers and analyzers of literature to people who don’t really belong in the class they’re in. Lately i’ve been in a good headspace about the type of students I get. I still am, but recent challenges have left me questioning the lines and responsibilities of a teacher.

At what point is writing –especially bad writing– a cry for help? We instructors ask students these deep any meaningful questions. We cast them out into the void like tiny lights, hoping depth and understanding will seek them like tiny moths. Sometimes I don’t get moths. I get angry fireflies who cast a light of their own and have no time or patience for the larger light of understanding. They shut their eyes against meaning and poke fun at understanding.

Teaching and learning is a relationship. I provide part of the relationship, but the student has to meet me halfway. They must want to open their eyes to understanding for actual understanding to occur. If that doesn’t happen, all that can come of the class is frustration and a reinforcement of the ideas that they came in with.

I wonder if that is what some students are looking for in the first place.

Today’s moment is an extension of this weekend’s momentum. We played our second game of basketball at the 8-9 level against a team much taller and on average more talented and better coached than my own. To begin, I coach a 12 person team of kids who, for the most part, have played less organized ball than I have (read less than 10 games). Most of the kids are short –very short–for their age and at least half just recently turned 8 in a league where a lot of their opponents are turning 10 during the season. The teaching needed could not be accomplished in the short window of time that we have and the result was two brutal losses, the second cemented by the fact that our top two scorers were unavailable to play.

At least the rotations were easier.

Now we have one practice left before the next game–one against a coach I truly want to beat. I’m thinking up ways to get my players to remember two key points. (1) spread out (2) crash the boards. I haven’t figured either out yet, but I am going to keep working through the night.

My children react to fatigue in very different ways. One sits on the edge of delirium, spastically happy until the smile is broken by some challenge to his world view. At that point He descends into a stubborn rage much like a bull supposedly does at the site of red. My youngest starts in rage mode, yelling and screaming and mad at the world. He too winds up in a bucket of his own tears once someone meets his rage with disappointment or rage of their own. The middle one cries from the onset, a rage filled wail of despair and injustice punctuated by claims that he is in fact, ‘not tired!’

The beauty of this is that they see none of it. To them, their behaviors have not changed. Instead the world has crashed down on them bringing with it several steamy flavors of injustice. This inability to reconcile with reality can be funny to watch or it can make you want to kick a kid, depending on your own mood. I admit to having felt both moods–sometimes minutes apart like emotional contractions seizing my brain and then body.

The key, of course, is to avoid situations in which they exert themselves past their limits or to institute a napping policy, though the latter course of action is likely to result in a self-styled mexican standoff wherein I represent two of the three ‘oponents’ offering the choice to sleep or to push them towards working extremely hard to the point where they are going to fall asleep on their own.

Today we had a Beyblade tournament. The excitement shook the walls. The excitement wore off near seven PM and was replaced by the wall of despair and rage. Having not fed them yet, it was impossible to put them to bed. Instead I was forced to endure the headache (actual–not figurative) of 3 ‘pissed up’ and tired little boys with no sense of their own behaviors.

10 minutes wasn’t enough to calm down.

I only became aware of the dad letters blog this very day because of a woman who is a wonderful writer and will one day make a wonderful mother. For the moment she is lending her skills to dads as a guest blogger, writing quite true and interesting things about this broken order of copulating men I belong to. Read it. The work is sure to inspire, as it did inspire me to channel the site into my own 10 minutes of writing. The Dad Letters is a straight-forward concept. Men write letters to their kids. The following words are my brief effort to share something with my own kids.

To My Sons:

It is most important to speak of my love first. This is very real, even if you cannot see it often enough, even if the screams that pierce your disobedience on occasion seem the only sounds my lips can make, the love is there. I learned what I know of fatherhood from a man who was my father in spirit, and thought, but never in legal name. I can count on two hands the number of times I cried after he died. It is uncountable the number of times I felt safe enough to cry when he was with me. Mothers are warmth and love and giving. Fathers are safety and growth and forgiveness, so I hope you can forgive me the moments of failure when I become too angry or the moments of weakness when I break down and let you slip a rule or several. I also hope you love as I do.

 

 

I’m supposed to play pickup football at 8 AM on Father’s Day. Already my heart is telling me not to do it.

Don’t get me wrong, I love football with a sick passion. I love the watching and the playing and the coaching–being involved at every possible level. In truth, a large part of why I want an xbox one all of a sudden is the realization that the new madden will be awe-some. Still, after the tragedy of last week’s basketball game, I’m not sure I’m ready to be dismantled in yet another sport. I’m a person whose entire identity has been predicated on speed. I am a person who is no longer fast enough to hide the glaring defects in technique and, as a result, is just bad at all that physical stuff now.

We can rebuild me. We can make me better.

But when will that start? At what point do I crawl off my butt and decide to be again. At what point is it too late? I watched Jerry Rice crumble 20 years into an NFL career, and I’m no Jerry Rice. I have not the level of skill or physical determination to share a paragraph with the dude, but I can say that even he fell off. I’ve fallen completely off and man, it is a long way down to bottom. So, what do I do?

Tomorrow is nothing. Tomorrow is everything. It represents a choice. Either I will be the guy who sits on the couch and talks about getting right as his belly swells, or I’m going to be the guy who humbly steps out unto a hot football field and says, ‘age is not going to beat me.’

Stay tuned for results.

It is high time to admit that we, as a nation, cannot fix the problems of the middle east. It is even more prudent to admit that the problems they face are not only not our primary concern, but more importantly, do not have the types of solutions we intend to impose. This nation and others before it has spent my entire lifetime (and even longer) battling over land that is not ours and is governed by ancient rules antithetical to the American way.

Critics have been quick to blame Obama for the latest crisis in Iraq. Somehow this one man, Barack Obama, didn’t do enough over the last 8 years to prevent this from happening. In truth, this was going to happen all along. We know this from the experience of our previous engagements in Iraq (yes, we’ve been there before with the same results) and Afghanistan (the Russians were there even before us, with the same results). This is bolstered by the events in Syria, which Obama was interested in become entangled in, but the American voters (wisely) put the kybosh on that one.

I gave up on politics a long time ago. I quit the moment I recognized that politics is about money, personality, and ego. This world conflicts boil down to conflicting ideology and the ‘who gets the girl’ mentality of teenage boys. Too bad ‘the girl’ in this case is a nation full of people who are struggling to live their daily lives without being shot in the face or stoned because they like a boy who their daddy says they can never touch. Sure, this is a minimalist reduction of the regional problem, but I continue to believe that everything can be boiled down to who has the power, how they try to hold on to that power, and whether or not that power is enough to make them happy.

Here’s a hint: It never is.

I’m full of epiphany lately.

The latest installment came moments before this blog as I finished what I thought was a fairly amazing round of Mass Effect 3. I scored second highest in my multiplayer session. I returned to the game lobby to discover that 2 out of 3 players had opted to kick me out of the session. I didn’t get it. I still don’t get it. The effect was just as shocking as taking a look at your ratings on ratemyprofessor.com, but without even the limited sense of reasoning that site offers. Here’s my takeaway–my epiphany for the day:

The world is not the way you see it. 

A few friends of mine have been hammering that one into me for a while now. I’m starting to peak in on this ‘other’ reality they claim exists instead of the one I’m content to live in, and I don’t like it. That one makes no sense. Mine is ordered and built around a sense of getting what you deserve and want out of life. I like mine better, even if it isn’t real.

Some Thoughts:

1. Just played my worst basketball game ever. At one point I air balled a free throw. I’m going to put this out there simply to acknowledge I’ve hit bottom. My athleticism has sank to depths so low that all I can do is get better. I’m going to the gym tomorrow to start that process.

I was reading a student paper when I had what Jay-Z would describe as a moment of clarity. I saw in the student this deeper level of joy and understanding about her daily life that opened me up to understanding what makes me happy and what does not.

Here is this thing: Not all people are suited for all things. I learned straight away that I didn’t have the patience for Wall Street, the temperament for Law School, or the raging desire of a professional athlete. However, I stopped there. I didn’t make that quantum leap of understanding to realize that this rule applies to more than our professional lives. In every aspect of being a person in this world there are things we are suited for and things we are not. To be complete means having all of those needs met/bases covered in a way that allows you to grow as a human every day. Conversely, to be incomplete means to be trapped in doldrums, failing to advance yourself in any positive way. I’ve fallen into this sense of incompleteness time and time again, wasting hours sitting in front of a TV flipping channels in search of a sense of completion.

I am not terribly self-aware. I notice tendencies in others long before I recognize that I’m seeing a reflection of what is missing in myself. When that student wrote about the beauty and joy she felt in the simple activity of making snacks for her kid’s soccer team I thought, wow she is really right for that role. Then I thought, who fills the roles I need in my own life?

The people in our lives complete us in some way. If they don’t they tend to feel extraneous or even cumbersome and slough off like so much dead skin. Those who we need burn like lighthouses on a stretch of sea. Moreover, I fear that people can come into your life in the wrong role or that roles can change over time. Reality is not static. It shifts and jumps and rolls and bubbles up beneath you in ways too hard to predict. I think the key for me is to always be evaluating where I am at, what I need, and how all of that comes together. In a sense, I feel like people need to be more like businesses, always working to find what and who works best for them in order to allow them to grow.