How I Spent My Summer Vacation…

My fourth semester of the “Return to College Tour” starts tomorrow so I thought I’d share a few thoughts regarding the last few months.

When I finished the last semester I posted a blog stating I would use this summer break from school to hone my craft…blog-wise.

Ok, so that didn’t happen. What happened was that I realized life happens. And when life happens, I tend to get sucked into the vortex of drama that daily life can be.  To whit:

I moved back to the City of Los Angeles for the first time in 35 years.

I transferred jobs…to a more high-stress, high-return sales environment. So far so good. The challenge being to not get swept up in the upward shift in income as I will again need to downsize in 2017 when I enroll at UCLA.

And as always, people can be counted on to do the wrong thing. I’m currently mired in a landlord-tenant dispute with my old landlord (I’ll spare you the details, suffice it to say they are sticking me to the tune of several hundred dollars despite the oral assurances of their representative)…so yeah, that’s pretty fun.

And oh yeah, when I moved, as I was pulling in front of my new apartment complex, my nice shiny Penske rental truck saw fit to take the front bumper off a parked car. More fun.

At the end of the day though, I’m loving life. Although the next three semesters of school are core classes for the transfer to UCLA and have nothing to do with writing, I suspect the discipline needed to maintain my GPA will lend itself to actually doing some creative writing, aka my blog. We shall see…

Finally, I’m frankly staying as busy as I can to avoid the sense of impending doom I’m experiencing with the loss of my youngest child to the University of Oregon. My new Duck is also my best friend (he’s the handsome one in the photo above) and I am really sad that I won’t be able to see him as much as I do now. Of course, this is tempered by my immense sense of pride and love I have for him. I am incredibly excited to watch his journey, just as I have marveled at the journey of my now college-junior daughter on the east coast. But there is a special bond between father and son and I’m already hurting…the good kind.

So, much like every other chapter of my life, my best laid plans got waylaid. Life got in the way.

And it’s a good life.

*Note to self: quit making plans. Just do the footwork and let the results take care of themselves…

 

Judgment Day…or Richard Sherman: Part Deux

So almost a week has passed since Richard Sherman’s ill-advised diatribe with Erin Andrews post-NFC Championship game.

Within 24 hours I posted my thoughts on that verbal missive.  One blog reader seemed to share some of my concerns, and another felt it necessary to fire up the ol’ keyboard  and launch an attack, apparently before finishing my post.

WordPress troll “Joe” (look up the definition of the word ‘troll’ Joe before launching another salvo) engaged in a classic attack on my post accusing me of judging Sherman.  The offense comes in two parts: 1) Blatantly judging me while first telling me “I’m not judging any of you” and 2) Spewing scripture in my general direction while “not judging”.

Joe is right. I judged the fuck out of Sherman. Webster defines that as “to form an opinion about (something or someone) after careful thought”. It’s my blog…it’s my opinion. Breaking news:  I get to judge. We all are free to form an opinion, even internet trolls like Joe. I would find this world pretty lame if we all lived Stepford lives and made no judgments.

I normally don’t respond to posts like Joe’s. I usually just let these posts speak for themselves, but I wanted to continue to judge Sherman and I didn’t want it to sound like capitulation to the bible thumping Joe’s of the world.

Here’s the deal: Sherman is starting to grow on me. Don’t get me wrong, I still hate the Seahawks, but after watching Sherman thoughtfully answering questions about the incident and his life, and reading some of his words, I find him to be what I suspected (and so “judged”) in my original post. He appears to be an educated, thoughtful, and sensitive young man. I really like how he’s handled himself in the aftermath of his outburst.

No Joe, I’m not perfect and I do my best to live my life serving others first. I believe in Karma. I also believe in calling out ignorance when I see it. No hard feelings buddy but don’t come on my blog and shove a bible verse in my face and then tell me how to live my life.

Judge on fellow bloggers…judge on…

Crazy Train…

The title describes my life perfectly at the moment. My new job is filled with moments sublime and quite literally, crazy at times…myself…my clients…it’s chaos in motion.

Not to mention the fact that they’ve been kind enough to accommodate my son’s varsity football schedule so I can see his final year playing. It’s been awesome but has required me to work some 12 and 16 hour shifts.

This on top of 6 units at school and trying to maintain a home as a single dad (and a huge pay cut for the new job) has been stressful to say the least.

I am becoming a master of time management however, and I intend on posting more often (yes, I’m actually penning in one hour a week to blog, that’s how anal I’ve become, schedule-wise)…

So I’ve got plenty cooking in the ol’ noggin’ but haven’t had time to scribe. For those following, I apologize, but in the absence of anything beyond my narcissistic rambling, I’d like to leave you with something of substance:

http://www.thehouseilivein.org/see-the-film/

I’m currently working on a research paper for my English class arguing that the topic of this documentary is akin to the Conservative movements efforts at engineering Social Darwinism…please check out this critically important topic..

Thanks for hanging with me and more to follow soon!

No…she’s not gone forever.

(My daughter and I at dinner last night before she left for college)

It started here.  365 days ago I started this blog.

I had just had hip surgery, was out of work for 6 weeks, and wanted to start writing.  My first post lamented the fact that my daughter was going across the country to college.  As I write this post, she is on a plane headed back to college after spending the summer home (and I saw her maybe a total of 5 times in the two months she was here). So to answer my first post…no, she’s (thankfully) not gone forever. In fact, at our going away embrace last night, the feelings of melancholy were replaced by pride and admiration.

A lot has changed in the last 365. She’s grown from my high school senior into a young woman in college. She’s made some choices I don’t agree with, but has been ruthlessly honest with me and for that I am eternally grateful. And when I review my choices at her age, my pride in her increases exponentially. She’s a good kid. She will kick ass in life and I’m beyond proud of her.

In the last year, this blog was “Freshly Pressed”, I discussed my aspirations with regard to becoming a writer, I posted a lot about politics, culture and sports.

Personally, I went back to college, and changed careers.  I’m riding 60-70 miles/wk. on my bike and hope to continue to fight the inevitability of aging with every fiber of my being.  Life is good…

I gained more followers than I could have imagined and made some nice friendships here.

I thank each of you that has followed my blog and look forward to producing content here that may be thought provoking and dare I say inspiring in the next 365…

Bots Not to Like?

I’ve been on a bit of a self-imposed break from blogging while I attend to other matters…life, more specifically. Work, school, the search for new work, kids, you know…the fabric of our lives.

But while I’ve been gone, at any given time of the day I look at the screen of my IPhone (with my nifty WP app installed) and find that, gee yet another adoring admirer has made the wise choice to follow my blog. Isn’t it astounding that at least 5-10 folks a day have decided that my blog is something they can’t live without…even while I’m not posting. In fact, specifically while I’m not posting.

While my ego is fighting oh so hard to believe that somewhere, one of my posts was published elsewhere and it is drawing this unprecedented attention to my blog, the cynic in me is prevailing.

I read briefly somewhere recently where a number of WP accounts were hacked and bots were raping and pillaging WordPress land. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m pretty uneducated when it comes to all things hacking, spamming, phishing and botting, but how else can I explain the proliferation of adulation from folks who’s primary language consists of characters…or a whole lot of folks from overseas who seem to find my blog in the middle of the night.

Part of me is selfishly digging the sudden surge in followers, as if by displaying a larger following will somehow lend credibility to the drivel I produce at this keyboard, but the other, shall we say, more sober side of me is greatly disappointed that these folks (bots) are not following me for my actual content.

Oh well, I guess in this day and age of Fox News and CNN and their brand of “Breaking News”, I should embrace the faux followers as actual substance…but…just like Fox and CNN it ultimately leaves an acrid taste in my mouth.

On being…”Freshly Pressed”

Being relatively new to WordPress, I had yet to explore everything the site had to offer.  So when I received an email last week from a woman named Cheri telling me that my post, “The Reluctant President”, would be featured on their “Freshly Pressed” page, I immediately assumed Cheri was a Nigerian overlord and this somehow involved me divulging my driver’s license and credit card number. In fact, I posted as much on my Facebook page.  “Hey guys, I’m pretty sure this is a scam…but in case it isn’t…” and proceeded to let a few of my friends know that I think maybe something relatively cool may have just happened.

I debated whether to even compose the post you are now reading, because if you know me, the last thing I want or need is attention…yes, I appreciate the irony.  Being “Freshly Pressed” for me is sort of like standing at a podium in a crowded auditorium that is so silent you can hear a pin drop and everyone is waiting for some pearls of wisdom to flow through the microphone.

The reason I’m posting is this:  Thank you.  Thank you to Cheri Lucas at WordPress for choosing my post.  Thank you to all of you that took time out of your day to read my post.  Thank you to all of you that liked it.  And a special thanks to all of you who are now following my posts.  I will try my utmost to provide you with some nuggets of intrigue and passion from here on out, but please realize I’m just a guy that loves to write and loves to express himself in the written word.  This blog is a commitment I’ve made to myself (and by extension, you now) to write “something” 6 days/week in order to improve my craft.  I love writing and am finding that by doing this I am transitioning from the infatuation stage into the full-blown psychotic, possessive love state where I want writing to have my children.  Okay, that may have been a little over-the-top, but you get my point.  I love writing.

So thank you…thank you WordPress, thank you followers and people who liked it.  And finally a special thanks to the posters and people who have commented…although I couldn’t disagree with some of you more, for the most part everyone has been incredibly civil in the discourse and that has given me great hope.  Hope that someday we can find some compromise among a currently fractured electorate.