10 Minute Rule

I don’t want to jinx it. Every time I write the G-men in as winners it ends up an L. While it is really egotistical to assume any statement I make has an effect on the outcome of a football game, I still hold on to superstition like a kid to stuffed bear. That being said, I won’t lie to you either. See, I believe the G-Men are going to win this one, especially facing a 3rd string QB with a former backup and a fullback as his 2 and 3.

Yeah, we got this.

The rest of the NFL is mystery to me. Once upon a week the Rams, Bucs, and Jags knew their place, but this past week all three won and made the greater fool out of a lot of top pickers. This week I hope they realize they’ve flown too close to the sun and fall back to the reality of the NFL basement. My picks mostly reflect that promise:

INDY over TEN
Despite the drubbing by St Louis, I still believe the Colts are a playoff caliber team. They’ll need to prove it this week in a bounce back game. I’m counting on their defense to bone up.

NYJ over BUF
These Jets win every other week. They didn’t win last week (bye week), so they’re due.

CHI over BAL
The Ravens flat out suck. It is a result of the new offensive schema and old offensive line.

CLE over CIN
HOU over OAK
AZ over JAC

WAS over PHI
IMHO, Nick Foles is not the real deal. In the face of an aggressive D, he will cave and make very bad choices.

TB over ATL
SD over MIA
NO over SF
NYG over GB
MIN over SEA
DEN over KC
CAR over NE

 

An eighth grade education is enough to get you through the majority of written and visual media. What we see and hear is geared towards an educated mass that realized that major basic education never survived the High School years. This is a purposeful manipulation geared towards addressing the largest segment of the population. We aim to please the masses, not just with Walmart, but with the other well placed distractions put before us. I believe that beneath much of the media we consume there are a series of subliminal messages geared towards teaching us the lessons we didn’t learn in school; the lessons that the creators–be they from the journalistic or entertainment realm–want us to learn.

Lets be clear: most of what is put forward as media is controlled by the power elite. These collectives make their money exactly like street drug dealers–they offer you a drug, which makes you feel good enough to come back for more and more. However, the drug might be cut with some real deep knowledge, should you be Einstein-slick enough to figure it out.

I first encountered the cavalcade of deeper meaning when I started watching Kubrick. 2001 is layered so thick with meaning that cracking through to the core can make someone’s career. However, not everyone is as subtle and layered as Kubrick and not everyone is taking this subliminal meaning to the positive side of the spectrum. When a Subway commercial quietly displays clips of Katniss Everdeen and reminds you that being bold could mean going to Subway and buying their food, they are manipulating you.

The key is to be smart enough to know it is happening.

So here’s the thing: I missed the waiver wire, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t want to write about football. If anything, I’m a bit superstitious about saying anything in the midst of a Giants winning streak. I’m hoping against hope for a 9-7 finish and a playoff birth that carries my team into the Superbowl–even more spectacularly–against the New York Jets. Both options seem long shots but possible in the scope of this crazy season. This is more than just the talk of a crazy overzealous fan. The jets are over .500 and already beat the Pats. The Giants have the weakest part of their schedule and several divisional games ahead of them. If both can come out on top of their divisions, the playoff road could be paved with injury-laden franchises.

The injury bug is the story of 2012-13 in a year where safety was supposed to be job #1. Instead of making the game safer, new rules threaten to maim players in their prime. If you cannot hit high, and cannot hit middle for fear of the player ducking and the head hit coming accidentally. Now the only way to be safe is to go for the legs, and the legs are what makes and breaks a career.

Despite the rule changes and uncertain franchises, I’m enjoying this season more than any since the G-men took it all. I like more things about more teams, so I watch a lot more football as a result. Say what you will about college football and how players supposedly play harder at that level, the level of parity in the NFL is higher now than it has been in a while. Sure, you have your Jaguars and your Bucs, but on any given Sunday any team can beat anyone else. Ask the Colts who were beat down to the tune of 38-8 this weekend by a Rams team starting their back up QB.

Football is always going to be a part of my life, and despite all the drama attached to it, football is a hell of a sport.

There is something ephemeral about vacations. You can lose yourself in vacations. You can become someone else. You can do things you would never do in your normal life, because in a few days it will be all over and you can go back to the monotony of your days.

Or, you can just be yourself.

You to be as close to the ideal form of yourself as possible, because you don’t have the responsibilities that keep you from being who you want to be and doing what you want to do. The best part about my ephemeral vacation: I got to walk miles and miles along the shore, taking the briefest of steps towards getting my health back. I did it because I had time to do it. I didn’t have the distractions of daily life; the responsibilities of a job. I had time to work on me. I left the experience wanting to work on me, but afraid I wouldn’t be able to find the balance to do that with everything else going on. However, it is high past time I recognized that tomorrow isn’t promised. I don’t know how many days I have left. I don’t know how long it will take to get right. I know that every day I devote to bettering myself both physically and mentally is another day I add to my life expectancy. On the other hand, every day I allow myself to rot is another day closer to rotting forever.

Morbid thoughts aren’t always the best motivators, but they are reminders of the beauty that is life and the way you want to live and the person you want to be. So, do you have what it takes to get there? Bet I do.

Someone had the bright idea of booking an academic convention and several boxing entourages at the same hotel on the weekend of the biggest fight of the season to date. There’s a joke somewhere in there about Jocks and Nerds inheriting the same space. In the end it was a great thing to be in the shared space. I was able to observe a part of life that I don’t usually see. I was able to watch prizefighters and their entourages prepare for a fight card.

The boxing card was a series of smaller matches leading up to the title fight between Garcia and Martinez. In the days leading up to the match and match day itself it was interesting to see the various entourages and fighters coming and going. The atmosphere was cordial but competitive with the older trainers explaining to each other why their fighter would certainly win. The outfits are what set everyone apart. The entourage wore mob-esque jump suits with their team name emblazoned on the front and back while the women wore hardly anything at all—Short skirts, high heels, ring girl attire, etc.

Boxing, like any sport, has more significance when you assume a personal connection to the people involved. The Darchiniyan v. Donaire card thus became relevant because we’d seen the fighters, listened in on some of the conversations, and had a chance to identify with members of the entourages on both sides.

 

There is a lot of ego built into the sports I’ve played. Baseball has some and football has a lot more, but witnessing how important every single match is to boxing—in fact every single round—really blew me away. Say what you will about the intelligence of boxers, but their earnest passion and their courage and heart are unmatched in any sport I’ve been around. This, of course, doesn’t mean certain prejudices and presumptions do not exist on both sides.

What I found most interesting about the whole situation were the conversations. At one point we met a man at the bar who was obviously a trainer and very clear about his supposed love for teachers and the teaching profession. Sadly, after he bought my group a round of drinks and praised us, the bartender told us that he was saying a lot of negative things about us—claiming we thought we were better than him.

I think people put a lot of their own ideas and prejudices on to a role, no matter what or who the person holding the role is. Role Identity is a real thing from an internal and external perspective.

In the midst of a uproarious conference on Learning Communities a session leader turned to a small group of us and requested we write (however briefly) about a memorable time we gave or received an act of compassion. I giggled at first, remembering that I’d recently evaluated a faculty member at my own college who offered this same assignment to her Developmental English students with mixed results. Then are started considering the idea of compassion itself. Then I decided that 10 minutes would be just enough time to explain why compassion can be both incredibly helpful and equally destructive.

 

The first act of compassion I can remember dates back in the early 80’s. Growing up as a New Yorker we are taught to have very specific feelings about the homeless. In Harlem you were meant to feel little pity for them, other than to assume that they were crazy and that in of itself deserved the most basic level of pity, but not so much that you actually gave them money, because to do so would have the same affect as would feeding a stray cat.

 

Lets just say I’m a cat person.

 

There was a homeless man who squatted between a church and an abandoned brownstone several blocks from my home. I never had much cash, and the cash I did have usually went to Lemonheads and Gobstoppers. However, one birthday I found myself especially flush and decided to put some of that blood-earned capital to good use. I gave the man ten dollars. This is, to nine-year-old boy in the 80’s, an absolute fortune. I felt like it was the right thing to do and I felt the better human for doing it. This feeling faded a day later when I saw that same man with a bottle of whiskey drinking himself into further oblivion. My mother didn’t have to say I told you so. I knew I contributed to his delinquency. I knew the guy bought that booze with my money and the result of that was me being broke and him being drunk.

It took a long time for me to be compassionate to anyone on that level. I measured their situation and considered whether my help was help at all or further enablement of negative behaviors. In fact it took me a long time to recognize that compassion is not about what people do with what you give, but the act of giving itself. Compassion is personal and healthy. It is the opportunity to give of yourself and reflect on how you feel about you after the giving.

Today I stepped onto a plane bound for Corpus Christi, Texas. It isn’t my bi-annual book pilgrimage but another substantial journey of the mind and in some ways the spirit. I talk about being a teacher from time to time. It is never something I actively wanted to do. I never turned to anyone and said, “I want to teach.” Yet here I am. I teach because it is who I am, the same way I write because I don’t know how to not to. That being said, an understanding of personal purpose in no way ensures ones ability. I am an average teacher. I am above average in desire, but the execution is incomplete. I haven’t reached that place psychologically or organizationally where I can put it all together in a one clean stroke, so that every student will get the level of learning they need from the course. So, I go on these journeys to better myself and to cement my understanding of my purpose. Some days I think I go on these journeys in order to lock myself into a particular role or function within teaching, because it is in my nature to want to do everything and give all I have to that impossible pursuit, in which winding up doing very little for everything and not enough for any specific thing.

 

That core point above is what I’ve worked the hardest to change over the last few years and been most successful changing. It shows in the way I choose my classes and my conferences. This conference, for example, is about Learning Communities. I’ve dedicated myself to being the consummate learning community instructor. That means understanding how what you do in class and what you teach connects to the wider world as well as connects to the content and purpose of the other courses with which you are integrated.

Chances are you’ll see at least one post about such business this weekend. With any luck I’ll also find the time to make my football picks.

 

Every writer tells stories about their own experiences. Every story is an autobiography of sorts, taking some aspect of the writers life and expanding it into a conflict or even a theme. The story I’m working on now is has a lot to do with my mother and this need to please her/make her extremely proud though I recognize how impossible that is. It is also impossible to avoid my personal relationships filtering into prose like water into the earth and raising stories and situations that, while not resembling the reality in the least, carry the charged emotions of reality.

Honest writing comes from real feelings and conflicts, no matter the genre. Therefore, the best way to be a writer is to accept the good and bad in life as material as opposed to trying to bury it so deep that it never sees the light of day. I couldn’t write an actual autobiography. My life hasn’t risen to the level of universally notable yet. On the other hand, I’d been through so many identifiable experiences by the age of 12 that I can write on those alone for the next decade.

We each have our demons that plague us and define us. Those demons can also be the fuel that powers the situations in our stories. From Huxley, to Phillip K Dick, to Baudelaire and Burroughs, each dealt with demons, coaxing them out of their psyche through words and drugs. I would go so far as to suggest that the most prolific writers are the ones harboring the most demons and that the pen is what kept them from going insane. Sometimes, like in the cases of Woolf, Thompson, and Plath, the words are not enough to excise the demons and they crawl deep inside of you, eating away at the light until all that is left is the desire to die.

I’m not yet the writer any of those greats are, nor do I claim to be gripped by the number and seismic force of the demons that possessed them. I am as most of us are, seeking clarity and understanding. After all, as Virginia Woolf once said, “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”

 

 

Today I lost my laptop. For the better part of the day I thought it was gone. I worried about my lost data, my unfinished novel that I felt was in the hands of some un-captured criminal. After hours of fretting, my mid-kid found the laptop. He isn’t clear on how it got to where it got, but he was able to locate it with relatively little trouble.

All that fretting for naught.

Afterwards I got to thinking about how valuable the things I carry really are. My laptop is a lifeline to the digital world, but it is also the sole repository of so many of my ideas. I’ve moved almost completely to the digital medium for storing my thoughts, and to lose the ‘top felt like a piece of me was shorn. I walked around like a zombie for most of the day, anxious about whether or not it could be found and nervous that it never would be.  In the end fortune smiled and granted me this small piece of tech.

Things are meaningful, but ideas are also extremely meaningful. Losing what I put to paper reminded me of the value of what I do and helped me to recognize the role it plays in my life. I need to write more and give more of myself to the words. The things that matter the most to you should be the things you do the most to preserve.

 

I’ve fallen into a bit of a routine. Come home from work, play with the kids, help the kids with homework, play a spot of Batman Origins, write for a bit (while hiding from aforementioned children), dinner,  clean up, play or watch tv with kids, prep kids for bed, watch tv by self, watch several hours of Breaking Bad with wife, write, sleep, repeat. Writing happens twice in that sandwich of events, but it doesn’t happen well. I’ve taken measures to maximize the time I have–namely making sure I can compact the work stuff into the work day–but I still have one last stage to go. I need to establish a solid writing hour during the time the kids and I are both home. This will ensure a healthy respect for the writing process as well as my personal space and time. It will also give me a time of day to write where I can assure myself the work product will be valuable.

Most authors will tell you to come to the page at the same time every day. I am that author, but I am also the guy with three boys, one wife, and no maid. Clearly there are parental and household responsibilities I am expected to keep pace with. The current routine doesn’t necessarily offer a lot of opportunity to do that, but I am ready to take that next leap and sacrifice some of the activities I really enjoy for the activity I truly love. Writing is a priority in my head but hasn’t always been a priority in my life. NanoWrimo is the perfect opportunity to make it so.

 

 

 

Some Thoughts: