...About How Busy I Am (Part V)?

V. The Wrap-Up

In addition to the time-vampires outlined earlier in the week, I'm also an avid film fan, I run a weekly Ultimate Frisbee game for my friends when it's warm, and I have some fitness goals I'd like to achieve (which means time spent in the gym). All of this adds up to a regularly cramped and hectic schedule. I'll admit that some of these things may seem more obviously important than others, but I've always thought that personal happiness is the single most important metric of one's life, so I'm going to continue to emphasize the "just for fun" activities as much as I'm able.

My old job is less and less important to me. My new job offers exciting possibilities, but I'm skeptical and worried about it. School is the same as it has ever been; boxes someone else decided that I needed to check off. Fine, whatever, I'll get them checked off. Magic is The Actual Best, and I've neglected that for too long. I think it's time to pick up the wand again, and this time I'm going to try and make a real go of it.

I've got some outstanding commitments to the old job that extend through the summer. I'm considering, as I mentioned, dropping one of the two shifts when the new school year begins. I figure that my daily life then will comprise of school, homework, and miscellaneous items from the To Do list in the morning, going to work in the afternoon, and then coming home and practicing for whatever the next tournament is. Not working at 7:00am every day will offer a few extra hours of practice each night, and I'm hoping this re-dedication will help me find some success. Not for my own benefit, but so that these kids that are somewhat interested in tournament Magic, or are in the midst of their own burnout, will reconsider their priorities somewhat. Tournament Magic has given me innumerable and immeasurable gifts, and I'd like as many awesome people as possible to share in that experience.

...About How Busy I Am (Part IV)?

IV. Magic: the Gathering

Getting in to competitive Magic is simply the best thing I've ever done. I've grown as a person, enjoyed an incredibly deep and satisfying game, and met the best humans on the planet. To go on and on about how strongly I feel about Magic would be an exercise in utilizing positive adjectives without repeating myself. Suffice it to say, I quite like the game.

And yet, I've spent less and less time playing it lately. I still watch coverage of and hang out at events, keep current with new cards and news, and play casually with friends once or twice a week. I maintain a Cube (a curated collection of cards from which events and games can be played), and am seemingly always working on something tangentially related to competitive Magic. But I gave up maintaining any sort of collection, or playing in events regularly, several years ago. Other things seemed like better or more important uses of my time and money. I don't really enjoy traveling, and almost never practiced for events even when I was playing, so making a real run at the professional scene didn't strike me as a good idea.

I've played in the occasional PTQ (an event which awards the winner with an invitation and plane ticket to the next professional event) or cash event, to varying success since having 'quit', but largely interact with game now only as a spectator. The reason I'm including this post in a series about why I'm so busy is because I'd like to change that. I want to help the people I care about succeed.

I think competitive Magic is a subject about which I'm both passionate and knowledgeable, and also something in which I can really help younger players excel. I'm friends with some of the best players in the state; they certainly don't need any help from me (but are obviously welcome to it if they like!). But there are some people that I know that have the potential to be truly excellent, and if I can help that process along in any way, I'd be more than thrilled. And yeah, if you're reading this and think you might be one of those people, you probably are.

So, while Magic isn't taking up a large portion of my time currently, that is one of the things I'd like to change. More details on that in tomorrow's post, wrapping up this series. Thanks for sticking with me so far!

...About How Busy I Am (Part III)?

III. CEP

As I have for the past ten years or so, each day begins at roughly 5:45 each morning as my alarm screeches, alerting me to the fact that I need to get up and shower so that I can be at Bowen by 7:00. I'm there for a couple of hours, and back again at 3:00 to watch the kids again until 6:00. For those counting, that's five hours a day, with a large gap in the middle (that I have filled with various things over the years, but is now mostly comprised of school). On days that school isn't in session (breaks or weather-related closings), we are open from 7:00am - 6:00pm, and most of the staff works six-to-eight hour shifts. This is true for summer break as well. We play games, go on field trips, do arts and crafts, and generally just try and provide the kids with a positive environment.

This is the second or third time I've tried writing this post. The previous two attempts came off far more negative and whiny than I intended. Hopefully this one reads a bit less dramatic. My enthusiasm for this position certainly has waned over the past couple of years, which is an experience I imagine most people will have after ten or more years doing mostly anything. I truly and completely believe that working at Bowen and Zachary Taylor over the past decade has been an incredibly and overwhelmingly positive experience. But I've been experience some burnout lately, and it seems pretty clear to me that I need something to change.

This could be the case for any number of reasons, but two things in particular seem to bother me more than anything else. Although the kids change somewhat year-to-year, every day at work feels like the same day that I've lived thousands of times before. We utilize the same spaces, play a lot of the same games, go on the same field trips, deal with the same behavior issues, eat the same snacks, etc. The list goes on and on. On top of that, and I'm fully aware that this may be a case of rose-colored glasses, but the kids seem to be much more aggressively mean to one another, and that just kinda sucks to be around all the time.

With that being said, I don't want to quit. There are a number of good reasons, but they all boil down to the fact that this is a very convenient job for somebody in college.. I'm considering scaling back my hours a bit; maybe only working half-days during the summer and/or maybe only working the afternoon shift when the next school year begins. Whatever ends up happening, though, this feels like the time commitment in my life most able to be trimmed down somewhat.

Tomorrow's post is going to briefly go over the thing on which I'm spent the largest percentage of my life.

...About How Busy I Am (Part II)?

II. Academia

Thus far, my path through the minefield that is higher education has been a bit less than ordinary, to say the least. The Cliffnotes version would highlight the two or three (or maybe four, depending on how you want to count things up) previous attempts at earning a silly piece of paper, only to quickly become disillusioned with the idea of spending countless hours and dollars in pursuit of something I wasn't even sure that I wanted. And, to be completely honest, I'm still not sure that I do, in fact, want to spend all of these resources for that silly piece of paper.

I'm working on a bachelor's degree in secondary education, with plans to teach high school math. As of March 2016, I have a semester's worth of classes to finish in the fall before I can apply for the professional half of the degree, which is a two-year minimum program as a full-time student. Up until this point, I have been waffling between full and part time, depending on scheduling concerns and my ever-fluctuating level of enthusiasm. This current semester and the next will be, if all goes according to plan, my last semesters as a part-time student for at least the next two years. I don't know what the workload will look like, but as this series of posts may indicate, I'm already rather constrained on time, so the increased course load is a significant concern. But that's a problem for future-me.

What I've been thinking about mostly in regards to my schooling is the apparent lack of a light at the end of the tunnel. You see, I'm not particularly jazzed about teaching apathetic high school students how to factor polynomials, or how to calculate the limits of trigonometric functions. I completely and wholeheartedly want to improve the lives of teenagers, and this was the best idea I had to accomplish that goal. I can't help but think I'm going to be an acceptable teacher at best; my heart just isn't in the material, and I have significant issues with many parts of the education system as it is currently set up. I'd love to have the attention of some kids that might like to learn about game theory or film, or kids that want to start lifting weights, but are apprehensive or scared, as I once was. Essentially, I want to use the things I've learned and in which I've found value to help kids "level up" faster than they otherwise might.

Life after high school is incredibly odd in my eyes. Nothing really changes all that much, not on its own anyway. The tools available to me now, at almost-30, are mostly the exact same tools I had available to me after graduation. Whatever positive changes I've made in the past two or three years, I could've made ten years ago, and there isn't really any good reason why I shouldn't have. And I think my experience wasn't wholly atypical. I think that the average teenager doesn't realize the power they have right now, in this very moment, and I think that helping them to realize that power is, maybe, the only thing I can reasonably try and do with my life. I simply can't imagine a future where I'm both happy and not working with and around teenagers every day. Learning things about which I'm passionate and improving myself generally has been incredibly rewarding, and I want to share that with everyone.

So I'm enrolled in the University of Louisville, checking off the boxes I'm told to I need to check off, so that I can one day get a job that only tangentially meets the criteria of what I'd like to do. And I'm doing this all so that I can be in a room with (somewhat attentive) audiences of young people. At worst I'll only be able to teach them how to memorize the things that the common core requires them to memorize, only to forget shortly thereafter. Hopefully I'll be able to do much more than that. If nothing else, I can't imagine it will end up leading to the same situation as my current job, but more on that tomorrow.

...About How Busy I Am?

Because, man, I'm really busy lately. Ironically, I only think of more and more things I can spend time on when I'm constantly in motion, driving from one obligation to the next, or spending precious hours on homework or gym sessions. This series of posts, one a day for the next week, is a direct result of being far too busy to add things to my plate, and hoping into the buffet line anyways.

There are a few central things that are occupying seemingly all of my time lately. Because I'm not used to this level of time commitment, and I'm not particularly enjoying the feeling of constant pressure, I'm hoping that examining the five main things that I spend time on will help me assess the value each of these things brings to my life, and help me when making decisions about my future trajectory. The plan is to write these in order of how long I've been doing each thing, starting with the newest demand on my time.

I. Teen Leaders' Club

I've recently taken a very small secondary position at the YMCA as a club adviser to a leadership club aimed at teens, in addition to working for the before-and-after school program at an elementary school. We have a weekly meeting where we discuss upcoming fundraisers and opportunities to earn volunteer hours, as well as some fitness-related activity. The program culminates with an optional week-long trip to the Blue Ridge Leaders' School in the mountains of North Carolina in June, where the kids will learn various leadership skills, meeting like-minded people, and generally have a good time. I'd compare it to a summer camp, but I've been told it's much closer to a school than that.

So far, my experience has been a bit of a mixed bag. As is the case with most teen programs I've encountered, the kids are great. They're energetic and fun to be around, and I've found it extremely refreshing to see kids that are excited about the program in which they're enrolled. I'm constantly thinking, as they're proposing fundraising ideas or talking excitedly about volunteering, "I never would've done these things. As a teenager, or an adult!" There are lots of similarities with various training seminars to which the Y has subjected me, the key difference being that these kids are excited and enthusiastic about participating. And that has been infectious, to say the least. Also worth noting is that I took over the club from an adviser that had been with them for a year. There was another person that was supposed to help me out, but she took a position with the Girl Scouts shortly thereafter, so I feel obliged not to be yet another person to leave these kids hanging.

But the kids have never been the problem with these kinds of programs, in my experience. Rigid and inflexible structures that don't actually support positive interaction with the programs have left a sour taste in my mouth each time. This program doesn't seem to have those issues; in fact, I'm realizing more and more that I can do almost anything I want! This is the kind of freedom I've wanted to build a teen-related program I've been searching for, but realizing I now have exactly what I've been striving for is somewhat scary. I can't blame any failure on an overbearing and incorrect structure, or subpar leadership, or anything else. It's all on me; my ideas either succeed or fail on their merits and my attitude and effort. It's scary and exciting at the same time, but I'm never sure if I'm more scared or excited.

In terms of a time commitment, this is fairly light. We meet once a week for 90 minutes, the occasional weekend event, some clerical work, and the week-long trip in the summer. As the newest experience covered in this series of posts, I don't have a lot of long-term data on this one, but I'm pretty happy with spending my time in this way for now, and it seems like I enjoy it more and more each week. Which, I think, is a pretty good place to be.

Come back tomorrow for a trip into academia!

...About My Favorite Things?

I had gone back to the University of Louisville with every intention of earning a teaching degree. I was quickly reminded of the miserable educational experience I had endured. I find great fault within the system, and after a good amount of waffling, I decided that it was not a system within which I could survive. I slowed down my schooling, opting for a couple of the required general education classes each semester, until I figured out what my next move would be.

Fast-forward to the present. As I’m writing this post, I’m roughly two weeks away from beginning two of my final three gen-eds, and I’m still as clueless as ever. The clock is winding down, and I absolutely need to decide on a major soon. Problem is, I can’t see myself in any sort of “big-boy” job. I’ll be visiting the career counseling center on campus, taking personality tests and visiting career fairs, but I’m not holding out much hope. All of the advice I’ve seen on the topic generally boils down to a simply idea: Do What You Love. With that in mind, I decided to take stock of the things that I love to do, and see where that gets me.

I. Consuming Great Media

    A few days ago, I watched Christopher Nolan’s Inception for the seventh or eighth time, three of which were in-theater viewings. Despite an intimate familiarity with the plot and dialogue, I still felt a rush of excitement during the action scenes, and lines of dialogue still sent chills down my spine and coated my arm with goosebumps. I can recall distinct instances when songs would unexpectedly cause me to choke-up, and hold back tears. There have been movies and television shows that have made me laugh until my sides hurt, bawled openly in public, and ponder very real questions of morality, justice, philosophy, and humanity. At the conclusion of some movies or books, I sit motionless and silent for a few minutes, in awe of what I had just experienced.

   

    There isn’t much time during an average day that I’m not consuming or discussing some kind of media, and I love every second of it. How people don’t wait with baited breath for the newest Scorsese film, Joss Whedon’s new show or Lupe Fiasco’s new album, I’ll never know.

II. Playing Games

    I see games as unique sets of challenges, a series of wagers that you can’t do something. “I bet you can’t use this army to capture my King, while I simultaneously try to do the same to you”, “I bet you can’t throw this ball into that hoop more times than I can”, or “I bet you can’t work with a team to rid the globe of these four diseases while outbreaks happen in different countries at once”. Overcoming these obstacles rewards the player with a distinct and wonderful sense of accomplishment.

    In addition to a fun way to spend an hour or two, games are tremendous educational opportunities. Most great games encourage creative thinking and strategic discipline. Athletic outings offer very obvious benefits to one's’ health, while promoting teamwork and good sportsmanship. I’ve experienced few things better than teaching a new game, and then watching as people piece together gameplans and strategies in real-time, their eyes lighting up with all of the possibilities, rising to whatever the current wager may be. “You bet I can’t? Just watch me.”

IV. Working With A+ Kids

    Anyone that works with kids and tells you they like them all the same is lying to you. I’ve worked for the Y’s before-and-after school program for almost a decade now. Each year, there are always some kids that stand out above the rest. I’m not sure what it is. They aren’t always the best behaved. They aren’t always the smartest, or the most polite. For whatever reason, though, these A+ kids are just much more fun to interact with. I can think of nothing that has impacted me more than getting to work day-in and day-out with those kids. Getting to watch them grow has been amazing, and it gets harder every year as more and more graduate and move on to new schools.

    There have been fewer and fewer A+ kids as time marches on. Maybe I’m getting burnt out on the job. Maybe, when I started, Bowen Elementary simply experienced an abnormally high number of these kids. I dunno. I was fortunate enough to spend this past summer with some of these A+ kids from the past few years at a summer camp for teens. It was easily the best summer I’ve had with the Y, and only helped to solidify in my mind what I had already began to suspect: I didn’t like working with just any group of kids; I liked working with awesome kids.

…

Now, someone tell me how to combine all of that into a career, and I’ll be good to go!

Humanity Unchained

The last day of Black History Month accompanied by the recent run at the Oscars by the motion pictures Django Unchained and Lincoln catapulted me into a deep reflection of the past and my often debilitating  “white guilt.” Since the liberation of my mind brought on by drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll I have often found myself wrapped up in a mindset that could be characterized as masochistic while thinking about slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, and the imperialist dominance of the Western Hemisphere. I often have prophesied that “white people got it coming and they deserve it.” Not only is a shameful mindset about the past, especially a past one had nothing to do with, fervently unproductive, but also disrespectful to the very thing which has induced the shame. Knowledge of the past serves no purpose if it only makes one pitiful, sorrowful and regretful. We do not make our lessons of the past practical by lamenting but by changing our behaviors in the future. Now that I have spent a paragraph telling you how I just learned a lesson you probably grasped at the age of twelve, let me present you with my “great” opinion of the day.

Slavery, in my mind. is the single greatest example of why learning history is important. Are we doomed to make the same mistakes? While there are areas of the globe where people are forced to work for less than a dollar a day with a gun pressed not so gently to the back of their head, the literal act of slavery is not the repeated mistake I wish to discuss today. After all what would be the point of talking about it? I have no idea how we stop it or change it or how to even make anyone care about it, seeing as it has gone on for decades now and the shopping malls which contain the products yielded by this profitable labor are only becoming more prolific. I would be a hypocrite regardless, I surely own a t-shirt made in a sweatshop and enjoy the spoils of cell phones, computers and televisions as much as anyone else. I gave up changing the world years ago when I learned that throwing a frisbee and cracking open another beer was far more fun than lengthy speeches about preventive action to pursue peace, and actions you can take to attack the authoritarian order of capitalism. I digress.

The mistake I wish to discuss that we can hopefully prevent from repeating is one of thinking. Ah yes, while my campaigns against the horrific actions of humanity have ceased, I still have some boyhood enthusiasm about the war for our minds. What is more despicable? The act of enslaving another human being, or the rationalizing thought process which allows us to believe that such an act is “just fine” and warranted by God? An answer to that question would be presumptuous at best. But let us dissect this thought process a little further. There was a time in the United States of America which was characterized by the exploitation of an entire race of human beings. The novel ideas of these people no longer being characterized as property, of these people being deserving of property, wages and education was so alarming for the times that a civil war was started in which a conservative 600,000 soldiers died and the Union almost crumbled. Wrap your head around that one.

Not only did we spend our days untroubled about the acts of slavery but when a growing number of people decided that it wasn’t so great, instead of taking our licks, realizing our wrongs, and allowing natural change to happen, we said “FUCK YOU, UNITED STATES!” withdrew from the union and took up arms. If you are able to take a moment to delve deep into the chasms of your own mind, do so and decide if you believe yourself capable of feeling so strongly about any one issue. Do you feel that strongly about anything good and humane? Would you fight so hard and act so defiantly about your children? I hope so. I really, really hope so. The one comfort I get from my reflection is that if a group of people can feel so strongly about something so obviously grotesque and abominable, hopefully when the time comes for us to act in defiance to defend something pure and good we will rise above the call.

I don’t think that I would have been one of the people irrationally defending slavery, I don’t think anyone reading this would have been either. I would like to think I would have been on the front lines with the most adamant abolitionists and that anyone I know at worst would have been neutral. That reassurance means nothing to the reason I decided to write about this subject though. The point is that some of the greatest minds ever collected in one room decided slavery wasn’t important enough to put on the agenda while they were changing the scope of human history forever. I am of course referring to our founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention. When the abolitionist movement finally began to take speed, people who were against slavery refused to support an amendment ending it due to the fear of those wretched creatures infiltrating society. Against all odds once slavery was ended, rampant racism and discrimination continued for more than 100 years afterwards. A war had been fought, many had died, history decided who was right and who was wrong, and we still thought that there were different levels of being human. God did not make everyone equal. There were men, then women, then them.

I cannot comprehend this. I have been guilty of being a sore loser and have even hurled some vicious insults to try to make myself feel better about losing. But I have never set out to create established reminders about how even though I lost I can still impose my will and superiority whenever I choose and however I choose to do so. It scares me. The original act scares me. The original thought process that allowed for slavery as an establishment to come into existence scares me. The proliferation of that thought process scares me. The resistance to change and decent logical thinking scares me. The death of 600,000 soldiers due to the clinging belief that slavery was OK scares me. What scares me the most though is the that after the war was over, the amendments written and the issue decided, this twisted, evil, demonic thought process continued.

Has it even ended today? Well, I am without question not the person to answer that question. I think that there are quite a few structural establishments in law, business, and society which are still inherently racist. I’ll let the guys and gals with degrees in Pan African Studies write the blog posts about the current state of affairs. I want to discuss what we can do with the knowledge of the depraved capabilities of the human mind. There are those that want to contextualize the political and social atmospheres of the slavery era and rationalize exactly what was going on. I’ve heard and read my fair share of these types of historical depictions and they honestly disgust me. There are reasons why it took so long to tackle the issue of slavery, there are reasons in addition to the irrational fear and hate of African Americans why southern states seceded and unfortunately the people of the times did inherit the problem. That doesn’t change the facts of the rationale of large portions of the country.

So to learn from the mistake of human thinking we must learn to think about our thinking. Not only must we examine our own personal philosophies about everything from day to day relations with coworkers, friends, and families, but also the philosophies of those in power in the workplace, community and national stage. Now before I go any further, this is not a political piece. There is nothing political at all about my motivations unless there are any remaining Confederate Democrats who are still sour about their defeat. I am only taking the stance that the greatest lessons we can take from history are the flaws in thinking that occurred which allowed for the travesties to happen.

Especially when there are permeating views of fear or hate we much question everything about the situation. We must consider history and examine if there are any gaping flaws in the arguments being made which usually call for some sort of drastic action. Whenever someone defends inequality, discrimination, or racism I only have to recall the lessons of history to realize the absolute lack of foundation in anything they have to say. Foreign policy, immigration, and gay rights are just a few of the large issues we must listen and discuss on a daily basis in the current political climate. I won’t tell you which side or view to pick. All I would like to see done is when the issues are being discussed, that a little consideration for the past would be included in the development of opinions.

In practice I have found that I end up being moderate about most issues. Even in subjects that I have a very clear and strong opinion about I find myself scaling back the fervor in which I defend my position. This is not only out of respect for the other people around me, but in the belief that justice is only useful when helpful. Merely establishing my point as correct in a dominant fashion does not help change the thinking of others who are of the opposition. I rarely want to argue a specific issue but to defend a way of thinking about issues. Opposition is necessary to prevent tyranny, factions, and oppression. Good thinking is necessary to prevent ignorance, abomination, and tragedy.