Tag: Life

  • Just Some General Bitching (Unedited)

    I’m having a hard time getting myself motivated. To do anything, really.

    Doesn’t help that I got two rejections in the last twenty-four hours. But this is part of the gig; Lots of rejection, and trying to not let it get to you. I’m at the point now where I am beginning to think that the story really isn’t that great. Or it needs a rewrite. Or maybe I just need to burn it and rid it’s presence from my life.

    The other thing is that I have spent the past hour catching up on my flash reading. I subscribe to a large number of online journals who email out flash fiction, and I have fallen behind of late, or the whole Summer. Anyway, I’m trying to get on top of it, and see what is worth reviewing. Nothing has been peaking my interest, and I started to think maybe it’s not the fiction, but me. Maybe my head isn’t in the right space for this.

    Time to take a break.

    More like changing gears, because here I am working on the blog. I have to get in my 1,000 words a day. (You know, it’s not so much writing as it is typing, and I think somewhere Truman Capote is laughing with me.) The only way to get better at something is practice. Practice! PRACTICE!

    As I sit here, I remember once, maybe back in college or sometime in my past, there was this writer complaining how much they hated blogs and bloggers. They said it was useless writing as all bloggers do is bitch about things in badly written ways. I don’t think writer was totally wrong.

    Yet, I feel that someone needs to sit down here and take a stand to say that some writing should just bitching, complaints, and listing of grievances. Isn’t bitching a form of expression?

    Sure, it would be better if I could string this expression in a clear narrative form, that has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end – with that end being a wonderful conclusion the initial thought. That would be nice and clean and concise.

    But life is messy and not clean, and sometimes this human experience is muddy, and gross, and undefined and rough and jagged. And uses bad grammar and has typos or type-o’s, or however one would spell that word.

    Sometimes you just got to get it off your chest to move on. And sometimes you want to scream into the void that a blog. A testament, a covenant that this moment existed, and was real, and had a value to no one else other than the person who wrote it.

    There you go.

  • A Summer Rainy Day Does Me No Good

    I have chores, like every day of my life, which I feel compelled to complete first before I can go out and work on the things that are important to me. There are holes to this system, other people have pointed it out to me, but I will argue on the whole it works. Every system can be improved, but what I have gets the job done.

    Except when it’s a rainy day. Like a full, gray cloudy sky day, when it feels like rain, smells like rain, and keeps raining. Summer rainy days are the worst. It’s all hot and humid outside, so it doubly makes me not want to go outside. (Autumn and Spring rainy days are at least classic, and charming. They make you want to stay inside and read.) There is very little enjoyment in going out in a hot sticky humid gross smelly Summer rainy day.

    Today was a Summer rainy day, and though the calendar says September 1st, the start of the Autumnal months, it is still Summer out. The air conditioner is still running, and will be for a week or two more.

    But I did my running around in the rain. Shopped groceries for the family, which meant that I was running up and down, all over Harlem, hitting up three different stores to get everything that we need for the week. I got a little wet, nothing awful, but I had on a raincoat, which was just an extra layer on top of an already icky day – the end result was that I was sweating while getting rained on.

    Now, I have earned my goal and have returned to the end of the couch to work on my work, and even get some reading in. Now, the rain out the window feels appropriate, and fairly measured.

  • META Settlement; Don’t Trust It

    The biggest problem I have with huge, multi-state settlements evolving enormous corporations, is that in the end, the public never benefits. I read the story about the settlement in the paper, and this morning I have been watching all the state AG’s lining up to do the morning news shows telling us how this is a “game changer” and a “new day” when it comes to breaking the addictive nature of social media, and its hold on our children.

    As far as I can tell, META is handing over an amount of money it can afford, and setting up guardrails for teen accounts, provided the teen sets up a teen account…

    But what if a teen sets up a fake account? Seems to me that it won’t take someone long to figure out a way around all of this, and then we pretty much are right back to where we began. Which I think was the point of settling in the first place.

    I see all of this as a very interesting form of performance art, enacted in the hopes to avoid regulation. {“Please don’t touch my algorithm if you please, Mr. Customs man.”} Like, if all the tech companies hand over some money, promise to change some of their rules, then the AG’s and all the politicians will give up on that whole nasty regulation thing, right? (While you’re at it, could you stop all this business about stopping our data centers?) It’s a really fun show, as long as you don’t think about how it’s affecting and ruining the world around you.

    The truth of the matter is that this is a big game, and as long as the company and the shareholders are making money, it will continue being played. Which is why I say that if you really want these social media companies to behave, you have to go after their addictive algorithms. They make their money off of us using that piece of code. Regulate the code, and they’ll play nice.

    Until that happens, all of these settlements are meaningless.  

  • Summer Break is Over

    Before I had a kid, and was a young adult running around New York City, the framework dates for Summer were simple; It lasted from Memorial Day to Labor Day. After Memorial Day, it felt like the City emptied out, and then the day after Labor Day, the City filled back up. And that was how I thought of Summer in those days.

    After having a kid, “Summer” returned to the definition it had when I was a child; Summer was from when school ended, to when school started up again. It didn’t fit neatly into the Memorial/Labor Day bookends, because the school bookends feel correct.

    Which brings me to say that Summer is over as the kid is back in school.

    And this was an okay Summer. Nothing amazing, but still fun. We did some road trips as a family, visiting Vermont and West Virginia. The kid went to her sleep away camp, which allowed all of us to enjoy a break from each other, and as enjoy reuniting as a family again.

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    (Here I am about to go four-wheelin’ in Vermont.)

    Creatively, I took a break this Summer. I kept up the journal, but decided that I should have a break from the blog, reviews, and fiction. I thought it best to catch up on reading, and start thinking about what I want to accomplish for the last half of the year. I did work a little on a novel, but it was more an exercise of fun, and not meant to be anything more than that.

    So, here I sit, writing a blog on the couch, a stack of books on the end table, and a crap ton of short stories clogging up my Inbox that need to be read and possibly reviewed. Then there are the stories I need to finish writing, and then proceed to submit to all the lit journals across the internets.

    Which leads me to say, I am looking forward to Autumn!

  • Why is It The Older I Get, The More I Enjoy Sports?

    I have a very kind and understanding family.

    I say this because they aren’t complaining about the amount of time I have sat in one place on the couch watching the World Cup. As of this moment, I have watched some potion of each match. I’m not saying I’ve seen the entirety of every game, just at least five minutes. And I am having fun. I mean I hate FIFA, as they are a corrupt group of assholes who skim and steal everything. But the World Cup as an event is awesome.

    As I sit here in my apartment enjoying all of this sports competition, I have to wonder when I became such a sports fan?

    I didn’t use to be like this. When I was a kid and into my teens, I wasn’t a sports fan. Those were my brothers in my family. I was the arty theatre kid. I’ve always had a competitive streak in me, as everyone in my family does, but I wasn’t coordinated or talented enough to be on any team.

    But sports were always on the tv when I was growing up. My dad would watch football in the fall and winter, so that was on every Sunday and Monday night. My oldest brother was way into baseball, so the was on tv over the Summers. My other brother was way into college basketball, so we always watched the NCAA tournament. If I was going to spend time with my maternal Grandfather over the Summer up in Illinois, that meant I was going to watch the Cubs on WGN. All this inundation, but I never went out seeking to follow a sports team on my own.

    Then somewhere in my mid-twenties it all started to change. I started watching the Cowboys, and never missed a game if it was on TV. Got really into following the Cubs, and pretty much didn’t look back. And soccer has been the latest, especially with the World Cup and Tottenham.

    And I have noticed about other people my age who are in the creative fields. I swear twenty years ago, none of them would have spent any of their time watching a game from any sport. Now, they have become diehard baseball or basketball fans. And I’m not talking about the local teams starts winning, and they started following. I mean true dedication and loyalty to teams that, well, suck.

    Maybe it does have to do with getting older. My mother, over the last fifteen or so years of her life was a huge San Antonio Spurs fan, back when it was Pop, Tim Duncan and that whole gang. It was a little odd hearing her tell me stats about the team, or who was injured, or needed to step up their game. She religiously watched every one of their games over a season, and we had to adjust family plans to fit around the playoffs. She never cared about sports before, then all of a sudden, she was hooked.

    Maybe this is just how life goes; the older you get, the more you like watching competition.