10 Minute Rule

There are things in life that are surprising and things in life that are expected. I’ve been fortunate to deal with both, but lately the expected is taking hold. As expected, the winding of the clock down towards semester absolution brings out the worst in all of us. For me it is a matter of trying to cram in as much learning as possible almost as if to make up for the days I wasn’t that great as a teacher. For them–some of them–it is a time to beg for grades above and beyond what was earned. We do this dance every semester, but I wonder if they’ll understand what they’re really asking for when the music stops.

Students often see the Community College as ‘less than’ which leads to a certain boldness when it comes to asking for grades. Why not? We aren’t a real college, so academic integrity shouldn’t matter. Its as if they are saying, “know your place” without once recognizing that demeaning this place by default demeans themselves as students in this place. I cannot change a grade from a D to an A because bad things are happening in your life. Bad things happen in every life. Every semester I walk away a little more encouraged and enlightened by that handful of students who’ve seen the real struggles of life and emerged from that with a clear understanding of the value and role of college–even community college–in their lives.

It is the other kind that vexes me. The ‘vacationer’ college student is a fixture of the institution. That Van Wilder-esque student who feels like they don’t need to apply themselves, because if they did the work would be so easy that it wouldn’t be worth doing. Too many students believe their own myth. I think that is because too many students are a product of their environment, and that environment isn’t riddled with strife the way it is with so many more successful students. People who understand struggle and survive it are the ones who tend to be successful in my book.

Or maybe I’m just rambling.

“Funny how sometimes you just find things.” ~ T.M. (The Mother)

It isn’t often a show gets everything right. For the better half of this final season of How I Met Your Mother I was convinced they got it wrong. I had no faith in the actress they chose to be the mother. She couldn’t, IMHO, carry such an important role and couldn’t hold a candle to the awesomeness of Cobie Smulders. As the season wore on purposefully, the character grew on me. I started to find a fondness for this interesting and quirky character who is perfect for our T.M. (Ted Mosby). I fell into the role and wanted to see it work out well.

Then genius struck. I told y’all they were gonna kill her off and they did. The dear mother was killed off, paving the way for Robin to become the dear Robin Mosby.

This story is about understanding something I’ve only recently realized: Opportunities arrive throughout life. There is nothing that says we are hopeless and ruined if things don’t happen for us right away. People grow and change throughout their lives and this is a show that tells that story through ever-evolving relationships.

Some Thoughts:

1. Now that I don’t have a ‘dog in this hunt’ so to speak, I’m no longer interested in the NCAA Men’s Basketball tourney. Call me selfish, but I don’t care.
2. The job of a teacher cannot merely be to deliver content. A book can do that. The job of a teacher is to help the student interpret and apply content to their specific situation first and to a global perspective secondarily.

I gave it some thought and I realized something that I’ve probably known all along. The hole isn’t new. Its been slowly coalescing–spreading its emptiness like a bald spot. I didn’t notice it as much because I’m generally in the right state of mind to power through. See, I’m a positive person. I’m a guy who sees the silver lining in everything. I look for happiness and find that my happy place is usually everywhere. I suppose I am effervescent, if that term could be properly applied to a person.

I’m not always that guy when I let things get to me.

The other side of my persona is a man who surrounds himself with people because they are so interesting and engaging. Unfortunately people can rub off on you and their moods, if powerful enough, can have a devastating effect on me. That has been the case for some time now. Its a numbers game I suppose. If the positive energy is equal to or greater than the negative, I have a good mindset. If the negative is an order of magnitude greater than the positive, I start to wear down and manifest escapist behaviors. Case and point: I play a lot of Minecraft.

There are self help books galore that teach people how to take control of their moods. I don’t need those. I need to learn to psychologically insulate myself against negative people. Of course, that means not wanting to ‘fix’ them and not caring enough to feel horrible and empathetic about their misery. A great deal of it comes down to accepting that you are not the source of their misery and that they don’t want to change.

Some people thrive in their own misery the way a pig will gleefully swirl around in cool mud. That’s the way they are and trying to make it different will kill you before it changes them.

Apologies to Jack Gantos for the lifted title, but it seemed apt.

I’ve been horribly deficient in my duties of late, to the point where I am lagging considerably in grading and writing. Motivation is part of it, but the real green-eyed monster is… heck, who am I kidding. It is all about motivation. It seems to be that I’ve lost that killer instinct–at least temporarily–to go out there and be wildly productive. That motivation dearth is something of a downer for me and utterly infectious in my home life.

Maybe its the other way around. I do have three video game and TV addicted boys. Truth be told, I’ve yet to figure out the reason behind this slump, but it is something I desperately need to address and learn to recognize before it becomes an issue.

Being unmotivated is fine when its just you, but when your actions affect others, the lack of drive is unacceptable.

I have a real problem with Susan Patton. The misguided author of ‘Marry Smart‘ doesn’t seem to have a clue about modern women. She claims women should be seeking a husband in college. She claims this is the most important thing they should be engaged with. Patton is making a point from a way of life that is utterly foreign to my way of life. I came from a college that made a joke of the Mrs. degree, but here she says this is what any good lady should be looking for.

The idea that a woman should snatch up her man in college is stupid. There isn’t one person I knew from college that didn’t evolve into a better version of themselves after leaving college. See, the university world is nothing like the real world and judging a person by who they are there is akin to marrying someone you think you know and then finding they are a completely different person. This could be why 41% of first marriages end in divorce.

It isn’t for me to decide what people do with their lives, but I promote education above all. It is the right of every human being to be educated and if we waste the hours of that education on pursuing ‘the safety of a husband’ then you’re wasting more than your hours. You are wasting your brain.

 

One of my classes is starting the book Deadline by Chris Crutcher. The book follows the last year of a high schooler diagnosed with a fatal disease. The lead character keeps his condition to himself, but knowing the end is nigh, he begins to take advantage of his life. He lives–really lives. In many ways I found myself looking at the lead character as a hero. I want to help my students gain a deeper understanding of what it means to live.

So many of us take life as it is handed to us. We do the same routine crap everyday and take few chances. We have the potential to be more but we don’t have the courage to be more. Because the character in the book is faced with a literal deadline, he had nothing left to lose and screwed up the courage to say and be and do more. In that sense a bucket list is an implicit promise to yourself to do more.

I’m not going to share my entire bucket list, because I don’t have one. Here are some things I want for myself:

1. Do a reading of my award-winning novel (that I haven’t written) at a writing conference
2. Go to Europe.
3. Swim in an Ocean I’ve never seen before.
4. Create a scholarship fund
5. Own a second home
6. Start in one more semi-pro football game

Thats just a peak. The real leap is taking one of those items and turning it into a plan. A bucket list isn’t something you leave lying around in the hopes the lottery takes you to your goal. A bucket list needs to be a resolution to accomplish a goal. Build backwards from the goal. Pick something you want and is in reach. Walk it back to the point where you recognize the first step, last step, and all steps in between.

Deadline is about living and living is something all of us deserve to do. We just gotta find the courage.

I received some unexpected feedback/pushback from yesterday’s rant. The comment that came in (through private channels) was about how other major stories have empty plots. The writer pointed to the now-famous Game of Thrones books as an example of a story that doesn’t truly have a direction but is a collection of characters basically riding around on horses and stabbing each other. Touche’… sort of. Game of Thrones and the Presidential Agent series both represent Milieu writing in a sense, but the difference lies in character development and subplot.

The W.E.B. Griffin series contains a cast of characters whose person and history is revealed through a series of conversations bordering on exposition as well as several well-timed flashbacks that reveal the essence of who these people are. Ignoring for a moment the oft black and white characterizations (though I mean this in the good or evil sense moreso than the racial sense, there is a non-too-subtle air of racism present towards those of Afro-American ilk in these books that troubles me but is also expected from a writer who comes from that era), these characters are provided with depth and history solely to the point that it influences their situations at the start of the story. This is not the case with G.R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones.

TGOT is defined by character growth. Instead of history defining the character, the actions of the story define who the character’s are. In truth, most of the original family the story begins with is unrecognizable by book 7. You’ve seen all of this growth happen on the page. You’ve grown alongside the characters and your own idea of good and evil dissolves into a meaningful understanding of personal stake. That is what good writing is supposed to be about. We learn from what we read and we grow from what we learn. You can say the plot is hollow, but only in the sense that the story is not driven by what is at stake for one specific character (which, BTW, is the case for the W.E.B Griffin series, because it is all about C.G. Castillo), but instead is about the specific interests and goals of the many individuals that make up this social world. Plot is generated by the relationship between the individuals and those highly divergent goals. In other words, it is not about what is at stake for one, but how what is at stake influences all.

Milieu is defined as one’s social world. In fiction we use the term to define stories about ‘the world’ vs. ‘the people’. The beauty of such a form is that characters can die yet the story can continue. To that end, I can’t even define The Presidential Agent Series as Milieu. If Castillo dies then this is over. Therefore, that series is something else entirely. It is lazy fiction written by a writer (and his son) who should have long ago docked their political and racial stereotypes and sailed off into the sunset of a wealthy retirement.

This could easily be a case of not truly understanding an audience, but i dont think that is what this is. No, I think there is a real tragedy unfolding. I watch it with each turn of the page and each moment of the audiobook. W.E.B. Griffin is destroying writing. He’s killing it with poorly contrived characters and absolutely empty plots. He’s doing it while hitting the NYT Best sellers list with every single book.

W.E.B. Griffin is the pen name of William E Butterworth, a longtime military fiction writer and a man whose political views and views on the role and honor of the military are on full display with each passing novel. He writes what is akin to a military procedural, a book that focuses painstakingly on the minutiae of military operations. In the case of his newest series, he is focused on the details of special operations–specifically those of the U.S. Special Operations Group.

His series, dubbed the Presidential Agent Series, follows the adventures of one C.G. Castillo who we repeatedly are told is perhaps the coolest MF to ever walk (or fly over) the planet. He is at once a Texican millionaire, German royalty, Newspaper magnate, top tier special operator, superstar military pilot (trained on multiple fixed wing and rotor craft), Mind boggling strategist, part time jerk, deeply honorable and loyal man, womanizer, and (deservedly) egotistical S.O.B. I write sci fi and I couldn’t dream a dude like this up–let alone pull it off. W.E.B. does pull it off for at least 2 of the (so far) 8 books driving the series. Our dear Karlchen (as he is referred to when in that part of the world) is beloved by all and hand picked by multiple presidents to solve all the ills of the world.

It doesn’t fly.
It doesn’t fly because the stories meander. The stories spend so much time establish how bleeding cool Castillo is that there is little time for plot. Everything exists as a flashback or a story shared by those who love him or hate him. In the latest book there isn’t even a legitimate plot. It is hundreds of pages of reminding the reader what came before and a few pages of advancing the story. I’m nearly halfway through and here is what went down:

1. President goes looking for Charlie. Sends people to call him back to active duty.
2. Charlie’s friends want to protect him.
3. Charlie’s enemies want to kill him.
4. Charlie gets the president’s message, boards a plane, meets with a Mexican cop. Boards another plane, heads to Germany.

That is the entire freaking story.

I’m waiting to be impressed.

This is a writing exercise I gave a class today and since I had ten minutes, I decided to do it with them. The first two sentences are the same story starter everyone began with. The rest is my own personal madness…

It’s been four hours since I last heard from her. I am getting worried. Everyone told me to follow her out to the wall, but I said I didn’t need to do that. I trusted Madison. She was young, brash of course, but she didn’t make stupid decisions. If I am going to be honest here, the real reason I didn’t follow her out is because I didn’t want to get up. Third shift is hell, especially on the smoke nights when you spend so much time peering into the thick darkness for shapes that every hour on post seems like three.

Now she’s out there somewhere. Madison never made it to the wall. Jim woke me up, wild eyed and asked me if I’d walked her over. I told him no and tried to shake myself awake. He labors over me, a fat man with eyes sunken deep into the sockets of his puffy red face. He yells then, calling to Sara and Domingo, the other two in our bunk. Madison was the youngest of us and she was my responsibility. She was my sister, not a bound-sister in the new way, but blood born from a mother neither of us had the chance to really know. Madison was the only family I had after dad fell. We survived together until we found this place.

Domingo crashes through the front door looking left, right, then marching straight towards us. His expression is lost beneath the beard, but his eyes flash his anger. “What the hell, Jim?”

…. And that’s ten.

Some nights you have it and some you don’t. This is a don’t night.

Some Thoughts:

1. CNN is a joke. They are cancelling other programing to continue 24 hr speculation about the missing plane. Seriously?!
2. It is easy to become obsessed with March Madness so long as you have a stake in it. I have had a stake in it.
3. I’ve been really distracted and scattered as of late. I don’t know why exactly. I’m starting to think unhealthy eating is playing a role. How else can I explain sitting here for ten minutes and barely scratching together 100 words. This could be a good thing of sorts. I mean, you gotta hit bottom to find out how high you need to climb back up.