Together, I Can

Writing a blog is five jobs: producer, writer, editor, promoter, and webmaster. It’s strange how something that takes 3 minutes to read takes so much effort.

I find that understanding the five jobs helps me to stay positive and motivated. I’ve found that, for myself, the effectiveness of saying “Oh, just do it!” is not very high; I don’t get much done. I find that a clearer concept of what I’m actually doing, that is, the tasks of what, in the real world, are done by multiple people, helps to truly put myself in the focus mode of each position so that I adequately perform all of the duties necessary to run a successful blog.

These roles, presented in order of appearance, are:

Producer

I function as a producer in being the one who motivates the project and makes it happen. Without the producer in me saying, “Hey, get going! Put your computer in your bag; get down to the library because you know that you can’t get much done in your house most of the time. Look, I’ll put gas in the car if you’re low; it’s fine, stop freaking out. Look, I know that you have ideas, and you really feel that you want to write them down, which is why I’ve set everything up to make it all easier. You can do it. Now, go!” Then, after the writer and the editor have done their job, the producer comes back and says to the editor, ok, now… post it! What are you waiting for? It’s never going to be perfect. Give it to the webmaster! (see below).

Writer

When a person writes a blog, it’s the ideas that get the most attention; it’s the creativity and the delivery that get the attention. I write stuff from my head, my heart, and my guts (if I have enough to say what I truly want to say), and then cross my fingers and pass it along to the…

Editor

The editor does the job that doesn’t get the credit when all goes well; it’s a very thankless position. Yet, without the editor, many people will stop reading a blog or a newspaper. There are even people who won’t read content that isn’t edited effectively. (I admit that there is a Royals blog that I don’t read because, sometimes, the content has bad grammar or is just plain negative-sounding.)

Webmaster

The webmaster receives the content from the editor, previews what it’ll look like on the blog, and posts it. He might also look at the content again after publishing it, perhaps, if necessary, saying, hey, maybe you should look at this again, Mr. Editor.

Promoter

This guy has the work that requires nothing but the excitability of a lottery winner. He simply looks at the content, assumes that it’s cool, gets all stoked, and tries to think of a catchy way to get people to get people’s attention so that they’ll read the blog. On my blog, acting as the promoter, I tweet a tantalizing teaser (hopefully it’s tantalizing!) and then post the address of my blog. I’ve got my Twitter account linked to my Facebook account so that my friends know when I’ve posted. The promoter knows that it’s going to take a while for readership to increase; the promoter simply says to the other 4 guys… I’ll keep getting it out there, you just make sure that what I’ve got to post is good stuff!

Un-valuable Logic

I love Miguel Cabrera as a baseball player. Love him. Hate him because he plays for the Tigers, a rival of my team, the Royals, but I love him. He’s so strong, but he doesn’t try to do too much. Still, I’m mad that he won a certain award this year.

This is why I’m angry. The type of thinking that we try to train out of mental health clients, the type that we try to teach children in schools and young adults in colleges, is given complete credence by so many people when it comes to column-writing and story reporting. Bob Dutton, who is the Royals beat writer, voted for Miguel Cabrera for MVP when he should have voted for Mike Trout. He was going to vote for Mike Trout, and then changed his mind because players said that Miguel Cabrera was better, was, to use Dutton’s words, more “valuable.” Dutton is a beat reporter for the Kansas City Star. I write on a free blog site. Dutton keeps me abreast of goings-on within the world of the Royals. I appreciate his work, especially since he’s been following a terrible team for a long time. While I disagree with Dutton, I suppose that that this an argument that can be made: people who do a job know how hard a job it is. I disagree with Mr. Dutton, and even Tweeted him an argument against his logic, but that’s not my focus today.

My focus is on the logic of people who voted for Cabrera over Mike Trout because of very bad logic. It is against this type of logic that athletes are coached and mental health clients are counseled.

In life, people have stress issues if they worry about things that they can’t control. They have performance issues, as well. I work as an academic coach. I can’t sit and stress about what kind of day the young man had before he came to me. I can only do my best within the 45 minutes that I get to work with him. Lack of focus creates shoddy work. The same is true of athletes, and it’s especially true in baseball. The Royals had a pitcher named Zack Greinke who lives with social anxiety disorder. The Royals, at the time that Greinke was with them, had a very bad defense. Very bad. Zack was taught to only control what he can control, that is, how and where he throws the baseball, and how he plays defense if the ball is hit somewhere in his domain of responsibility. Zack is a freak athlete, anyway, but the increased focus that he found from not stressing about what would happen if the ball were hit to a bad defender who made a bad play, combined with his plan to focus on one pitch at t a time, resulted in an historic season, and he was justly awarded with the Cy Young Award, the award presented to the best pitcher in his league. Greinke was already capable of doing what he did. … The potential was always there. What changed was his focus. In order to focus, he had to clear his mind of negative thoughts.

Now, in baseball, we have three traditional stats that tell us if a hitter is having a good year: batting average (hits per at bat), home runs, and RBI (when one hits the baseball and someone scores (or if the bases are loaded and he draws a walk). If you lead the league in all of these categories, you have won the Triple Crown. Miguel Cabrera did that: .330/44 homers/139 RBI. He also scored 109 runs despite the fact that his principle job is to make sure that other people score… His winning the award is super cool…

Buuuuut… a guy named Mike Trout did this: .326/30/83, scoring 129 runs, in 21 fewer games – he drove in 83 runs despite the fact that that’s not his primary job; and, he stole 49 bases* (Cabrera stole 4). The thing is, Cabrera is a not a good defender. At his very best, he’s average. Trout, on the other hand, is a superb defensive outfielder. In summary, what Cabrera did hadn’t been done in 45 years. However, Trout’s combination of steals and homers has almost never been done. Yet, Miguel Cabrera won the league Most Valuable Player award. Now, to the crux of my temper on the matter:

*Steals are a decent measure of how well a guy uses his speed on the base paths.

It’s not that I have a problem with people voting for Cabrera. One could find an argument or two for him. I think that Dutton’s reasons - basing his vote on whom do other players think should win the award and whom would a manager want in the batter’s box with the game on the line – are weak. Still, they’re, at least, not logically problematic and adolescent. What I have a problem with is the voters who voted for Cabrera based on him winning the Triple Crown. Here’s why.

Just as a pitcher is told to only worry about what he can control, a hitter cannot control what happens to the ball after it leaves his bat, nor the actions of the other guys on the field towards retrieving the ball. He cannot control if a base runner falls down and doesn’t score; he can’t control if he gets a hit even if he hits a the ball super hard. He can’t even control if, in the event that he hits the ball really high and far, it goes over the wall. EVEN MORE TO THE POINT, a hitter doesn’t control where he hits in the lineup; he doesn’t control what managers think of him and whether they’d consider pitching to him in a key situation. RBI is a stat that measure s situations largely beyond the hitter’s control.

I am mad because this stuff is tolerated. I am mad because, in my opinion, we U.S. citizens need to grow up in our thinking and information-processing. This kind of reasoning is adolescent.

Seek and Ye Shall Find...

I often marvel at how marvelously successful people can act so humble. People like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jayhawks men’s basketball coach Bill Self, and a Royals pitcher named Joakim Soria just don’t seem to have big heads. Like, at all.

I think that humility comes from four main sources: competitive perspective – there are other people just as good or better at what one does; cosmic/religious perspective – to the greatness of a deity/size of the universe, one’s individual greatness is as nothing; the understanding that there’s always room for improvement – no one is perfect; and frequency of failure – successful people often fail far more frequently than so-called “failures.”

I’ve felt for a while that I’ll be able to move forward faster in my life if I find humility, so I’ve been searching for it, and I think that I’ve finally found it thanks to the fourth cause of humility – frequency of failure. I’m now an academic coach - what most people call a tutor – and, boy, have I found humility. Most days, even if I understand perfectly the subject matter that I’m teaching, I leave my sessions wondering if I’ve done even the slightest bit of good and wondering if I’ve communicated effectively. Sure, I’ve had a moment of triumph - I found out that one of my students got a B on his Spelling test when he hadn’t passed a single one to that point. Even so, doubts like the following constantly run through my head: “I have six students, and it’s about to be seven. I surely can’t feel that one success with one student means that I’m succeeding with them all. How do I know if I’m doing them any real good? Can’t the rate of improvement always be a little bit higher? Am I moving too fast?

The frequency of failure truly hits home as I practice piano daily. I focus on playing all the notes at the right times, try to balance the volume in both hands, yet I still make hundreds of little mistakes in the hour or so that I practice. Coaching academics gives me so much opportunity to fail. I think, then, that the success is in learning. Success is understanding that failure never has to stop motion. My communications instructor during college says, “Just work to post quality content. Do nothing more. Just try to post quality content.” So, that’s what I try to do with my blog, tweets, with anything that I post on Facebook, with any comment that I make on the radio, and what I do when I try to write songs.

In my efforts to post quality content, I fail so much. I could always say something a little bit better or find a clearer or briefer way to express my thoughts, but I have to fail. I have to fail before I can succeed; and, no matter how much I succeed, more failures wait to creep up and bite me. I was teaching voice lessons to a group of wonderful ladies. Yet, one by one, they dropped out. It’s most likely that they really have just gotten too busy, but I still can’t help but feel that if I’d made the product attractive enough that they’d have found time to continue. It’s not like we didn’t have fun, and they certainly produced more quality sound as we went along, and it’s not like they stopped lessons right after starting. If I ever get to teach voice lessons again, though, I’ve certainly learned what I’ll do differently, even if I never get to work with those ladies again. The loss of the opportunity feels like a very humbling failure.

Bamba Blindside

He didn’t even speak Spanish…

Last night, I saw a movie about Ritchie Valens. That Rock n’ Roll pioneer.

I’m not a rock star. Perhaps, I’ll never be. But, as a passionate music lover and semi-pro musician, hanging out with a couple of Mexican friends who love Ritchie’s music, I felt connected to “my roots.” I felt like I was learning about my history.

Why it hadn’t registered in my head that it was Ritchie Valens, the original “La Bamba” guy, was one of the people who died in Clear Lake, I’m not sure…

“The day the music died.”

Watching the movie, all that I knew from the exposition of the film, and from my friends, was that Ritchie was the “La Bamba” guy… but then, when the film showed a guy with glasses about to board a plane during a snowstorm, and a big fella who vaguely resembled a guy whom I vaguely remembered from a video clip of “Chantilly Lace” that I’d seen about 10 years ago, it suddenly hit me… and the moment of realization and shock pressed on me almost as if it had just happened…. Valens was getting on a plane with Buddy Holly… and the Big Bopper*… oh my lord… no… the day the music died…

*Note: Talk about “stealing black music.” Listen to “White Lightning” recorded by the Big Bopper. Just… wow.

And Waylon Jennings could’ve been on that plane. For those who follow me on Twitter*, you got a tease of this entry. To think how those guys, Waylon for example, used the time that they perhaps could’ve never had… If life isn’t random sometimes, explain to me how a coin toss gave us Waylon, Shooter, etc. Try to imagine country music history with out the name Jennings. Then try to imagine rock n’ roll history with more Ritchie Valens. Either result of the coin toss gives us a major plus, and a major sadness.

*Shameless plug: @mapnmusicman

Now, think of the music that we’ll never get to hear form Ritchie. He was a hell of a guitar player. We got Waylon. In a way, from now on, when I hear Waylon’s music, I feel like I’ll be hearing a piece of Ritchie, of Buddy Holly, of the Big Bopper.

I’d been wondering, off and on, about the mystique of things that will never be but could’ve been… what if Mickey Mantle (baseball reference, kids) hadn’t drunk away a good chunk of his health and gotten knee problems? What if Ritchie Valens hadn’t died? Now, I think that I understand… It seems that there’s a personal connection to the loss of the glorious things that could’ve been. We are all united in this loss. It always feels new and fresh. I could hardly get to sleep last night… the power of that realization, and to lose Ritchie, and the fact that there was a little miscommunication when one of my friends told me that the actor was still alive and I misheard him and thought that he meant that Ritchie was still alive… The death of the hope of seeing Ritchie somewhere in his old age crushed me, and thinking about all of the great music that he could’ve made… Perhaps he would’ve learned Spanish and, today, there’d be more blending of Mexican and White music. Perhaps he would’ve flamed out after a couple more hits… But, his guitar ability makes me think not. RIP Ritchie. To me, you just died. Thank you for the music.

Making Up Rules

Perhaps there isn’t a lot to say this time. My last project was to try to lessen my clutter. I did fairly well; I got rid of two grocery bag sizes of trash. I felt, at first, like the whole project was just moving too slowly. I felt like all that I was really doing was getting my junk count down to where it was when I moved from my old house. Let’s face it; one is always acquiring more junk. Advertising in the mail, pay stubs, bank receipts, for me things like sheet music, show programs. How does one decide what’s necessary and what isn’t? Well, for starters, some of my junk was from my financial advisor, so I called her and asked if some of those generic mail-outs were necessary to keep. She said no, so that got rid of a handful of booklets.

One thing that I have going for me at the moment is that I’m really starting to enjoy having floor space in my bedroom. Currently, the boxes of junk are in the living room, and I’m doing the sorting there. I feel much more creatively free with space in my bedroom. I feel more inclined to sit down at my keyboard and play… the reader will recall that one of my current intentions is to make playing the piano a daily part of my life. Which reminds me that I need to get some playing in before I leave to call the football game tonight. Fire pit time awaits me after I get back from the game, so I probably won’t do any playing tonight.

In any case, I feel pretty good about the progress that I’ve made. I think that, if I achieve my ends in this junk sorting project, I’ll reward myself with a carrot cake. Oh, yeah.

One of the things that I accomplished was clearing off the top of my roll-top desk (yes, I have one of those.) I put my CDs (yes, I have those) on little horizontal racks so that they’re properly displayed and the top of my roll-top looks much better. I could get accustomed to this improved organization.

The rule that I’m making up is that I’m going to extend this project. I feel that, though it’s good to not get stuck on one thing, it is good to see a project through. I feel that this project is probably the most important short-term one that I’ve undertaken to this point. It’s so important because it speaks to three larger issues: 1) overall organization of possessions, 2) future freedom, and 3) lessening of stress. To not have all that junk weighing me down will really help my stress levels. I’ve got a box of stuff to donate that’s already 1/8 full, and I still have 5 boxes to sort through. Well, really, it’s about 4, but it feels like more because some of those boxes are small. Some things have found places to belong, and the resultant organization is very pacifying.

Note: This article is written in the present tense from last Friday, when I intended to publish it.

Baby Steps

I love my housemate. He’s a terrific listener and offers marvelous insights. In college, he was a member of the cross country team and has maintained his conditioning. This commitment taught him a lot, it seems, and I’m now the beneficiary of a big pearl of wisdom.

He and I were talking about this mutual acquaintance of ours, and I mentioned how she talked about working out. He was a little surprised, and said, I didn’t think that her body looked like the type of a person who makes working out a regular part of her life. He said that he can tell by looking at a person how committed he/she is to working out. He said, for a lot of people, they work out for a little while, super hard core for a couple of weeks, and then they flame out. I jumped the gun and correctly guessed that he could tell that I was such a person.

I was fascinated by this concept because it seemed to speak to a larger issue in my life… the inability to completely follow through on personal improvement plans. This whole three days’ focus series is a way for me to be focused on being productive. To this point, I’ve had success with the three days’ focus series because it has ensured that I, at the very least, start projects. I find this to be an effective method, especially for little projects that can be completed, largely, in three days’ time. However…

The last three days’ focus project was to focus on playing the piano. I’d said that I wanted to achieve 15 hours of practice time towards that magical 10,000-hour target which, when achieved, would probably put me at the level of piano mastery (note that I’m not saying virtuosity). In looking at my progress, I tabulated 2 hours and 15 minutes. Now, if I took the measurements and compared them to my goal, surely I would consider this last project a failure. But, I don’t, and it’s because of my conversation with my housemate.

You see, in that discussion, Housemate mentioned that, to really make something a part of your life, you want to start out small and simply commit to it. I played piano on each of the three days. If I make the piano playing a daily thing, then, perhaps, some days, I’ll practice much more than 25 or 50 minutes. If I tabulate those times, perhaps by the end of the year I’ll be close to 1,000 hours. Perhaps, in coming years, I’ll commit even more and reach 10,000 hours after 5 or 6 years. At that time, I’ll still be in my early thirties, and have the rest of my life to let the keys help me to go wherever I want to go!

In speaking of going wherever I want to go, today I started a new three days’ focus project. The reader may recall that one of my earlier entries was “Clutter Confrontation,” in which I described my attempts to de-clutter my bedroom, making it more livable. I made moderate progress at the time, and now I’m going whole hog. I’ve hauled 98% of the boxes of junk out of my bedroom and started asking myself questions like “What can I do with this?” “Is there somewhere in my house that this can belong?” I feel that working on this project and organizing the junque (misspelling intentional. Junque refers to junk that isn’t worthless… it’s just in the way) will enable me to move about the world more freely. I have no plans to settle permanently in Salina, and, when I do move, I want my move to be relatively stress-free, and having control over my possessions will make that much more likely. So, for today, tomorrow, and the next day, I’m doing battle with my past that I might have a more stress free future. ¡Olé!

Three Days' Focus Interlude: Who is my audience?

Writers produce more effective writing when they keep their audience in mind. Well, more specifically, when they write to the audience. My goal is to produce effective writing. If I’m going to do this, I must not only write with plenty of voice, edit myself to have effective use of conventions, etc., but must also write to the audience.

The thing is that my goal with the “Three Days’ Focus” personal improvement plan and the accompanying editorials is, well, to learn to focus. So, it seems to me that, rather than just saying “I’m trying to write in a good journalistic style” or “I’m writing to anyone who likes to read introspective literature,” I think that I should write to a specific person, whether real or imaginary.

So, what is the appeal in doing this? Frankly, I think that it’s an appeal of personal taste. Consider how historically exciting it is when one reads what Lincoln wrote to his wife, or your mother to your father in old love letters. You get to put yourself immediately in the personal and empathetic mindset of reading. It’s similar to how much popular intrigue books like Harry Potter have. In these books, seemingly half the literature is dialogue. Reading plays, too, is exciting; the reader can picture him/herself in the scene. “Open letter to [some person]”-type literature (Morris’s “Open Letter to a Christian Nation,” and Living Colour’s “Open Letter to a Landlord” are powerful examples of this medium. I’m going to try, for a while, to write thus. So, for example, and I’m not sure at this point who the particular audience member will be, you might see a passage like:

Therefore, Marvin (Marvin is my M&M dispenser), the reason that I have decided to make the next three days’ focus project a song to my grandma is because….

Or, perhaps, I don’t need to name the person out loud (figuratively speaking). Perhaps, as the writer, I simply need to keep that person in mind.

It’s important to note, however, that I‘m not writing this way because of someone, as Dante wrote the Divine Comedy because he couldn’t get over his obsession with Beatrice; I’m not writing to a muse. I’m writing this for myself to a particular person so that that person might know me. Johnnny Rzeznik, in the iconic pop rock hit “Iris,” wrote “I don’t want the world to see me/Cuz I don’t think that they’d [sic] understand/When everything’s made to be broken/I just want you to know who I am.” In this exercise, you could say that I’m writing of my personal progress to this particular audience member in order to build the relationship. This isn’t a method of persuasion; it’s a method of relationship- and self-building.

So, who is my addressee?

I feel that it would be very short-sighted, or at least potentially trivial, to write to a love interest. More to the point, I think that it would be hard to resist the urge to impress a love interest. I think that there is a part of me that is a teenage boy who is willing, potentially, to do almost anything kosher in order to get the sweet-smiling, kind, confident girl to notice him… A guy is likely to do things out of character just to seem cool or unique. For me, I’d rather stay true to myself and make more of a conscious effort to produce quality content than to stumble onto quality content by accident. I think that I’m more likely to impress a love interest if I do the best that I can at what I do… this blog, appropriately, being a potential part of that. Yay, me!

Picking a person gives me pause. It feels like a very powerful choice. Jumping off of a cliff is easier with a battle cry. The selection of my addressee is my battle cry.

Do I write to someone famous who can help me to achieve my dreams by giving me advice from his/her success? If I did, I’d probably write to Charlie Daniels, Johnny Rzeznik and Alice Cooper because some combination of their music is probably something like I would/will write. But, that’s not really my style. I prefer to try to do the little things right and let success follow from there.

This isn’t getting me anywhere. It looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of over-thinking myself and nearly falling into the secondary, and worse, inaction trap. I’m not going to let myself fail. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll compromise with myself that I’ll not be married to this choice… If I change my mind later, I’ll roll with it. So, here I go…

I’m now writing this blog to my siblings.

The reasons are too many to count, but the biggest one is that my mom has two wishes for us, her children. I can’t honor one of them, but I will do my best to honor the second, and that is that my siblings and I should be friends. In order to be friends with people, they have to know you. Here goes. To “yuce guys,” this blog’s for you. It’s to you.

To those of you who’re kind enough to listen in, you’re welcome here, indeed invited. Hopefully, this audience selection makes your read better from now on.

Brain Shower

This entry was delayed by the death and burial of my grandmother, a very special woman to whom I was very close.

The last three days’ focus was to work on a poem.

Result: I enjoyed the brainstorming stage of writing the poem. I’m technically still in the brainstorming stage. When I began with my three-days’-focus series, I promised myself that I would not be too hard on myself for an unfinished project. And to that I hold.

The trouble, for me, in any creative work, is that, sometimes, I just have to make a choice, and I cannot expect every choice to be perfect. I pursue perfection, yet I know that I won’t achieve it.

The question for me will become, when I make it past the brainstorming stage, can I come up with something coherent that says what I want to say.

The next three days’ focus project: work on exercises that are in my piano book. I took four years of lessons at KWU, and, I’ll admit, I never really practiced. I think that I passed because my instructor was more interested that I understand the concepts of playing… that, and, at least during my lessons, I was able to do what she wanted me to do. At the time that I was a music major at KWU, the program was still building and solidifying. Does this excuse my lack of proficiency? No, certainly not. I was more concerned with my class attendance (the skill of commitment-keeping) and my emotional growth, social growth, and involvedness than I was with actually building skills. College, it seems, for me was a 3.75-year foray into learning how to think… I recount with embarrassment how it always seems like I know a fair amount of things, but I can do hardly anything.

There is a difference between intelligence and smartness. To illustrate this, I go back to a conversation with one of my college instructors. This conversation took place about six months ago. The professor said to me, in a tone of comfort (necessary because I was coping with mistreatment at the time), that I was “pretty smart,” and at, at the time, this didn’t make sense to me. “Pretty smart? I’ve had people complimenting my intelligence all my life! You’re just downplaying it because I’m not good at what you do, because I don’t have the skills and didn’t succeed all that much.” It was moronic to think this… Perhaps, if I’d had guts and said this thought out loud, I might’ve learned faster the difference that I now understand. This particular instructor is also a coach, and the activity that he coaches requires not that people be intelligent, but that they be smart. Smartness, then, is intelligence in action. By this definition, I’m not very smart. I have the intelligence to learn smarts, but I need to focus and practice in order to obtain these smarts.

As far as being a musician goes, it’s quite embarrassing to sit down at a piano and not be able to do what my brain wants done. I have many of the piano concepts in my head, but that only makes me intelligent. It doesn’t make me piano-smart. I’m going to spend the next three days, starting tomorrow because tonight I’m covering a high school football game on the radio, working rather hard to build some piano smarts. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours of commitment to master something… I’m going to see if I can make it at least 15 hours closer to piano mastery.

Clutter Confrontation

Talk abou’chr floor space! Check this action out!

A moderate success in the second three days' focus project

My second three days’ focus project was to focus on arranging my room.

Report: I made considerable progress on the first day, and then didn’t accomplish anything the next two days. I did show off my progress to my housemate and his girlfriend, though. *sticks tongue out to the side obnoxiously*

How I progressed: This box of random j-u-n-q-u-e sat behind the door to my bedroom. Having sorted through it, I was able to play a game of rearrange-the-squares-to-make-the-picture in my room. I don’t have much shelf space, but I changed what I kept on the shelf and put storage containers closer together, near my closet. The end result is that I can now walk freely into my room. I can see my desk completely, there are probably 24 square feet of free floor space now, and I have easy access to my piano keyboard.

Looking forward, now, to the next three days: I will be celebrating my nephew’s first birthday tomorrow (Eight hours of driving are involved.), and I’m directing my church choir in the morning, so I’ll lose an entire day of progress (for a good reason.)

Unless…

I work on a poem.

I’ve realized that the beauty of poetry is, in part, that every word is carefully chosen. And, even though one can sit there, putting his/her thoughts in lines and rhyme words at the ends of those lines, there isn’t any depth, any gravity, to the work other than simple conversational idea communication. So, I think that my thoughts, pensamientos, need to be more carefully considered when I write poetry. My next three days’ focus project is to work on a poem dealing with the concept of how some things will never be. I will search for ways to express the profundities of what “neverness” means. The choosing of the right words should involve lots of brainstorming, structuring, and careful consideration. I don’t expect to “finish” the poem, but, perhaps, I’ll make a good start.

Crunch Time

The first three days’ focus ends, the new one pondered.

The first three days’ focus didn't turn out as well as it should've, but it is also wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. The reality is that I managed to do core exercises each of the three days. I’m putting that one in the win column.

Predictably, or, to be honest, what I should’ve hypothesized would be a result, was that, in focusing on one thing for several days, I found myself more motivated to do other things. For example, I was thinking about making sure that I worked on my core muscles, yet I also started thinking about a yard project, read another 60 or so pages of a book, kept the kitchen clean, and wrote some more brainstormed ideas for a book that I’d like to write. So, if nothing else, these three days’ focus projects may set me up for continued success in doing all of the little things right. Heck, I even did some more thinking about a barbershop arrangement that I hope to write.

The question now becomes “What do I focus on for these next three days?” I think that I have my answer, and the answer comes from noticing inconveniences in my work-out time. I tend to not work out when I feel confined by space. Scratch that. I tend not to do ANY work when I’m confined or when there is the slightest hindrance to working on a project. My room, you see, is not very open because I have too much clutter. Clutter, though, is a problem not easily dealt with… For me, at least. I have found that I don’t like to start a project unless I can stay with it and get it completed. And, I don’t like to take things out of containers (I should have noted earlier that these containers contain all of the stuff that I describe as clutter; I’ve gotten better at not leaving clutter out in the open.

So, my conclusion is that the three days’ focus for Wednesday through Friday is going to be working on that stack of storage buckets so that I have more openness in my bedroom. Heck, maybe I’ll even do a few core exercises along the way if the principle of being more motivated to do other things while I work on a principle project continues to hold true. Turn on the music, Self, you’ve got three days of hard work ahead of you. Rock on.

Three Days’ Focus

Nothing like Orwell’s "Two Minutes Hate"

I called a friend of mine last night. He’s a visual artist. He’s got a sweet set-up in Lawrence, a little one bedroom apartment where he can produce, enjoy, and discover creative works. I wanted to ask him how he manages to focus on projects, get things done.

Somehow, though, it seems that the simple fact of calling him and thinking it out loud gave me an idea… well, that, and I went for a slow country drive. I took some Oreos with me. In any case, I called him because he seemed to be a person who could relate to my intentions. You see, there’re all sorts of projects that I want to do, poems that I want to write, songs, arrangements, physical conditioning, audio recordings, blogging, language learning. I feel like my problem is motivational and focus-related.

It’s like, once I get into a project, I can while away the hours and get a lot done, having a lot of fun and feeling in the zone. Yet, I tend to waste time just staring around the house trying to make up my mind what I’m going to do.

So, here’s what I came up with. I’m going to focus on one project at a time. It’s going to be an intense 3-day focus of each project. If I get it done, great; if I don’t, that’s ok, too.

I’ve arrived at this idea because I’ve noticed that I got a lot more done when I have something demanding on which to focus. When I was reading a book recently, I felt that all that I wanted to do was to finish the book. It seemed that I could focus super hardcore for a couple of days. I’d like to build up my focus ability, though. So, I think that three days of focus presents a good challenge. Here goes. First project: physical conditioning. Working on the core muscles for the next three days. Game on. 365 days in a year, so 121 projects to complete. If I do 121 projects, it should be a helluva year.

Do we grieve as we should? Two stories that make me wonder...

Riding on a bus headed for Niagara Falls, having only dozed for maybe two hours from Junction City to Kansas City (MO), and having just enjoyed a delicious breakfast sandwich made by two men speaking that sonorous KCMO Black accent, I decided to listen to some music. But, the bus's Wi-Fi wasn't keeping up with Pandora, so I picked Tracy Lawrence and soon realized that I was in the mood for country ballads. What has followed so far was the rest of Tracy's ballads from his Greatest Hits, then "Straight Tequila Nights" by John Anderson, and now I'm on Blackhawk. When I got to Tracy's "Texas Tornado," I started to tear up... I began thinking of something that I had in the past, something that wasn't really right for me (which I had known for most of the duration) but that I still missed parts of. I remember that, when that relationship ended, or, more specifically, morphed (how often does a relationship truly "end?"), I was upset and hurt, and had some moisture in my eyes... ********************************** In the early 1980s, years before I was born, the maternal side of my family endured a catastrophic series of losses. In around two years, FOURTEEN of them died. Three of the four generations lost at least one member. My grandmother lost her husband to Parkinson's disease. My aunt and uncle lost two sons, one to drowning, one who had complications as an infant and died before his fourth month began. Around 20 years later, Grandma was driving her white Plymouth Breeze (she prefers red) to my cousin's basic training graduation. She doesn't remember how, but she must have fallen asleep. The crash broke a bone in almost every apendage. She survived, living to defy death again on her 80th birthday, four years later... but, she wasn't the same. She sat around all day, drugged up on varying degrees of pain killers, gaining so much weight that my mother began to insist that she pull herself up when someone proposed the taking of a picture... She, my mother, didn't want my youngest brother to remember his Grandma as an amorphous blob in an easy chair. In the Spring of 2009, my sister made up her mind to bring Grandma to live with her in Salina... To paraphrase, my sister said to my grandma, "You can go to free shows all the time, have your own house, and we'll even get you a cat!" Due to a combined effort from sister (40%), grandma (35%), and myself (25%), grandma has lost over 60 lbs. which on a woman of 5'1" is spectacular. We're hoping that she wins her war with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and hangs around for another 5-10 years. Her distinctive mannerisms have all returned, she does chores, and sure loves to chat. Once, I asked Grandma what in the world she was doing, what she was thinking about, all those years, 8 or 9, that she was just sitting in a chair... Of course, part of what she was doing was coping with pain, but she took me aback when she said, "I never really had a chance to grieve." "For Aunt Mary?" I asked, referring to her younger sister who died of a diabetes-related heart attack over 15 years ago. "Well, yes, but also for Daddy." (Grandma always forgets to which generation she's talking. She meant my grandfather.) She had struck me. "For GRANDPA?" I asked incredulously. "But that was in 1982!" "Well, I never really had a chance to mourn. Someone always needed me." "You held in all that pain for over 25 years?" Thirty years after the death of a grandfather he'll never know in this world, the grandson who bears his grandfather's first name as his middle, accented in a way that leads most people to pronounce it inappropriately upon first reading, a grandson who still signs everything with that big, loopy, capital "B.," rides on a bus to support his mother in the completion of her two-year certificate program in Spiritual Guidance. Perhaps, his reasons for holding in the sadness are steeped in latent bitterness, pride, and incredulousness, yet, still, he's been unable to completely move on. This sadness needs an outlet. I wonder... How often do we grieve as we should, mourning the losses in our life? How often do we let the sadness and hurt lie buried in our subconscious mind, hindering our emotional maturity? *************************** Dialogue from an episode of the TV show "Scrubs"... The surgeon's brother's wife left him, and the surgeon risks making his fiancè angry by taking his brother out for drinks. The brother asks what he's supposed to do, and Dr. Turk takes over: "Barkeep, I'm gonna need these two glasses, and that bottle of whisky. 'Scuse me, yes, my brother definitely needs to borrow your hat. And for the love of all that is holy! Will somebody please put on some country!"

How I Became a Man, Part 2: A Complimentary Coach

In part 2 of my series on men who taught me to be a man, I profile a coach who kept me on his teams for a good number of years.

As an athlete, there were physical reasons for my lagging-behindedness. To be honest, I never told my teammates about my eyes or my asthma unless they asked. I always fought to be the best that I could be. Athletically, though, there were just some things that I could not overcome.

When it came to baseball, I think that I loved practice more than I loved games. Shoot, at games, I knew that I wasn't a good hitter, but I sure didn't swing at pitches that weren't strikes! Looking back, it makes me smile to think that maybe I always batted 14th because of my high on-base percentage, the coach knowing that I would be a smart baserunner and would come in to score thanks to the hitters at the top of the order. But, digression aside, practice was action. It was playing catch, reps at the plate. When I got older, it meant batting cages, too. I've held back tears at times, thinking of how much I loved baseball, wishing that I were better at it, but practice was pure immersion in the sport(s) that I loved. There was a boy a year ahead of me in school whose dad always got me on his team. Here are the values that I learned from that:

My coach, one year, after giving awards to the great athletic performers of the team from the previous season, gave me special recognition. Perhaps, he doesn't recall saying it, but he said that I was the player with the most heart. He loved having me on his teams.

As a side note, it's weird to think back on how, in school, I was "the smart kid," but, somehow, my teammates in sports never teased me... and I was, in all honesty, one of the least-talented players on my team, regardless of sport. I don't know whether it was the coaches looking out for me or my teammates respecting my hustle, but it's an aspect of my childhood for which I am very grateful to my teammates, and it's worth mentioning.

This was one of those things that seemed small to me at the time: the awards show ended, my mom emphasized that he'd said that about me, and that was it. But, it stuck with me.

So, there was the compliment, but I remember him pitching to me at practice. I remember his smile and the way that he always seemed glad to see me. Here was this father of two, a man whose familial and financial lifestyle was nothing like the one that this little boy knew (he had wonderful grass in his back yard; one year we had our end-of-year picnic and played whiffle ball), a man with very strong shoulders and I a little boy with virtually no physical strength: we were different. But, he reached out to me in ceaseless, tireless acceptance and support.

Aren't the comments of those who rarely give us any time the ones that we hold so closely to our heart? I remember three such occasions in the case of my sire, baseball-wise. Once, I was throwing at a fence, and he said that I should use the strength in my legs. One season, when I was not on the team of the coach about whom I write today, I got to pitch, and he, my father, actually attended a game, and afterwards told me that I threw faster than he had; the third time was when he played catch with me and showed me the basics of throwing a curve. How much I cherished those brief moments! ... Yet, they were almost as nothing when compared to the body of work of my coach.

I love to think about the butterfly effect, how one seemingly small act begets so many others... The buttefly effect has always served an amazingly positive influence in my life. In the example of this coach, his simple act to always include me on his wonderful teams led to me meeting another couple who coached our team. Despite the fact that I couldn't hit a damn beach ball, the lady coach said that I had a beautiful, level swing, something that I worked very hard to develop: when I make mistakes, often it's from trying to follow directions too much to the letter. I had learned, from an early age, the value of swinging through the ball. Here, years later, was validation of my efforts!

Finally, a very important aspect of character to mention (in the realm of example-setting lessons that I learned) about this coach: he and his wife attended, literally, every athletic activity in which their boys took part; the missus kept score at all the games. That kind of support has really stuck with me, and it served as a strong counter-attack to my father's dismissal of my endeavors as less important than his own desires. This couple's children grew up genuine, stable, and respectful; even as a child, the older boy and I sat having a conversation where we discovered common ground - by our peers, we were held to ridiculously high standards, he, as an athlete, and I, as a scholar; this supportive boy never showed me anything but friendship. I cannot help but make the assumption that this quality of character came to him largely from his marvelously supportive father.

How I Became a Man, Part 1: A Man with an Open-door, Open-Heart Policy

I recently tweeted (@MapNMusicMan) that I did not become a bad-ass all on my own. This series I'm beginning now profiles the powerful and/or subtly helpful influences of the men in my life who taught me how to be a man.

...One of the keys to a person being successful at her job of single-mothering is to understand her weaknesses and find ways to overcome them. My mother chose to overcome what she, deep down, probably knew was a flaw on her part - her insistence that I my father try to act like a dad – by annoyingly insisting that I get out of the house and do stuff… With some of these things, I think that it was harder to force me than others. She had a tough time getting me to go to school, a somewhat difficult time to get me to go to Boy Scout meetings (I don’t recall being difficult about camping trip departures, at least from a motivational standpoint), a little difficulty with church youth group. On the other hand, I think that I made it pretty easy for her to motivate me to go to soccer-baseball-basketball practice, but, in any case, I'm glad that she did. All of the men whom I met set some sort of good example for me or gave me some good idea of how I could find the path to success.

So, further ado to be left in the dust, here we go, starting off with the man through whose influence I am writing this blog in the first place.

Note: In order to protect privacy, I'm not going to use names.

My college communications instructor

Sometimes in life, I think that we run across people who, for some reason or other, we just want to sit and listen to them talk to us. I've been blessed to meet several such people. This gentleman's kindness has been so powerful for me. I say kindness because he gives me lots of advice; as I grow older, I believe more and more that advice freely given by others is a precious gift. When people take the time to give you advice, they often are people who deeply, truly care about you. How many people sit by and watch us fail, enjoying our pain?

A couple of the gems of sage-ness that he's shared (not direct quotes):

Make your job what you would do anyway; then, your work is just you being you, and it's not a job

What's your band going to offer that no one else has really done? Lyle Lovett uses Western swing to tell stories that have nothing to do with cowboy life. Living Colour is a band from Harlem that plays metal.

Sometimes, the best advice comes from a person not telling you what to do, but helping you to avoid making mistakes:

On my idea to make textbook audio books:
I think that you'll find that creative path fraught with difficulties for which you're not yet ready. Your time would be better spent focusing on something more basic.(Paraphrased)

I have stopped by his office numerous times just to talk, or to vent, or to throw out some random creative idea that I have. He always listens to me, encourages me. Every time that I apply for a job, I call him up and read him my cover letter, and he always finds something to make my cover letter slightly better and more professional-sounding.

He never tells me what I want to hear unless he thinks that I will have a chance to succeed. Sometimes, he's talking to me, and I just sit there, trying to be cool and hold back a smile, but I just love listening to him.

If he reads this, I hope that he knows that I don't know how stable I'd be, or if I'd have even been able to choose the few mildly-committal directions that I've chosen.