I found your old diaries today. Reading things through your perspective was a blessing — I wish I had been able to do it sooner. There was so much longing in you. Such a desire to transcend the awkwardly concentrated existence you chose and find true love. It was heartbreaking to read as they neglected you, as the can opener met something it couldn’t crack. I have had a couple of relationships, one healthy, one not — and for that, I thank you. Because you were able to channel all that negligence and heartbreak into nothing but love for me. Because I was able to learn quickly what it took you a lifetime to do. Because I could hear it all in every syllable you spoke.

You battled so hard in this world. You had so much to overcome. The traps of the past, the independence you had to declare, and the soul of you that shone through poverty and the unrequited desire.

I need to let you know a few things.

That I am, as always, appreciative that we picked each other. We both know the inner curses and torments, and together we will continue to work to overcome them. To self-actualize ourselves.
That your knack for serendipity cannot be questioned. You know just the right time to introduce me to things — am I starting to find my spiritual compass now? I am so happy that you continue to lurk in my mind. So happy that you are my guardian angel as you lay in wait.
That I will do all I can to watch for her as well. Both the one that I know, and the one that I don’t.

And most of all…

 That I always felt this.
And I can’t wait for you to come back so I can teach you all I’ve learned. We’ll repeat this dance until peace is earned.

I suppose that the reason this married couple bickers as if they are children is some sort of play on the idea of “child-like wonderment” that is supposed to go along with this product. After all, TV’s have been pushing these new enhanced TV sets to us for awhile. I’m not an extremely social person, I admit, but I’ve yet to meet someone who has praised or desperately wanted one of these TV’s. It just seems like a set of extra features that my phone has already been able to do for three years, and most of us are more comfortable using that then a TV remote at this point.

The reason it irks me? Because it continues this push towards the inhumanity of everything. Every day the world is getting bigger, but your personal world is getting smaller. People stay in contact more with people who are a distance from them, and this seems like some sort of nightmare endgame for the scenario: we can’t even fucking talk to each other like normal human beings when we’re in the same room.

Finally, what kind of self-respecting man lets his wife push him around like this? You apologize and attempt to move on, not apologize and then apologize eight more times, and then play a song that says “it’s hard for me to say I’m sorry” when apparently it is really easy since you can’t stop doing it. Advertisers love to play on helplessness. I don’t want to psychoanalyze two people that I, frankly, hate already based on their passive-aggressive antics, but nobody should have a hold on you like this woman does to this man.

I’ve had quite a few girlfriends in my time — if any of them had changed their Facebook status to single (and I’m taking the leap that this matters as much as it apparently does to this man in the time period I was in), it would end with them apologizing to me, not the other way around. Honestly, it would probably be the end of the whole relationship. Yet this man just takes it like a complete and utter chump. Actually, an unironic status update that talked about how spicy those tacos last night were would probably be enough to drive me away. I’m picky like that.

I guess my problem with the product comes down to the fact that TV’s aren’t portable. You offer me no new utilization of anything by putting all the things “I love” in a product that I can’t move. I already have that: it’s called a desktop computer. I can even play TV on it if I want to wire it that way. Claiming that this is some sort of breakthrough (“The Wonder of Samsung!”) strikes me as spurious — all you’ve done is invented a commercial that sells unneeded TV services to people who would probably be better investing their money on therapy than smart TV’s.

Maybe then they’d actually be able to talk to each other.

Jeez, one more week and we’ll be at a month.

Another week of decent measurements and no weight loss. I’m going to attempt to turn the tables this week.

I’m not going to work out at all. No kettlebells or walks. This is also partially because I hurt my knee a bit with poor technique last Friday though, and I’d like to give it some rest. I’m also going to quit the recommended PAGG stack for a week, just to experiment, because it seems like I (anecdotally, again) lost more weight without it the first time I tried this back in February.

Still feeling good about the whole thing, still think it’s producing noticeable results on my belly, but would like the validation of pure weight loss.

For those of you who are new to the blog: I attended UH from 2006- December 2008, leaving two foreign language credit hours short of a Creative Writing degree solely because my mother had a heart attack at the beginning of 2009 and I wanted to be able to be around for her while she adjusted to that life. She had three more hospital visits that year for various maladies, and I did what I could to hold the household together and help take care of my sister for her.

I had finally deemed myself ready to finish in 2010 — I scheduled an appointment with an academic advisor to talk about finishing up in the summer. They told me that because of the year I’d been off, I would be back up to four semesters of foreign language as I had apparently lost all knowledge of anything I had learned in a year. Of course, this doesn’t apply to any of my other courses, because the rule was ill-conceived, but whatever: this post will be whiny enough without turning every injustice into a rallying point. I would simply attempt to test up on the requirements.

In April of that year, my father passed away. I needed to go AWOL for a few months and take care of all his dealings, paperwork, and so forth. I didn’t get a chance to really take a crack at studying for anything, so I just put it off until I thought I had a chance to do that. A couple of real jobs and another parent death later, here I am in October trying to get back to school and get the piece of paper that I have (mostly) earned.

-I called the counselor’s office to ask for an appointment to talk to them in September, this time they said that because of recent changes, they needed me to re-apply. To go back to a school I already had been at and had done fairly well at. (I can’t remember exactly what I had, but off the top of my head, I believe I carried a ~ 3.5 GPA.)
-I finally finagled the free time to apply last Saturday, and I called over on Tuesday to try to set up an appointment. They said to call back on Friday, because with the new rules in place they have apparently lost the ability to schedule things more than a week in advance.
-Finally, when I called Friday, I was informed that not only do I have to apply to see an advisor, I would also need to be accepted and go to orientation before I could see one. Even though, you know, I’ve been to orientation before.

I don’t really see what this is accomplishing for them. I’m going to do my best to get myself caught up on Spanish in the next two months (I might even try my hand at it in a few entries here or there), but it sure would be helpful to go in and find out exactly what I need to try to take and what I need to be thinking about with some advance notice.

Or we could just keep moving the goalposts until it’s a week before I start. Next time I call in, I’ll probably be classified as an illegal alien. Or told that I can’t get an appointment unless I am one. Whatever it takes to make this process more irritating.

(#whitewhine)

This ad was conceived when a ConocoPhillips executive shouted forcefully at a director that had already delivered two not-good-enough ads: “Why can’t you make cute college girls understand that gas is good?” To which the director complained that this just wasn’t possible in a 30-second ad. The resulting commercial takes place after that director was fired, along with any spare plausibility that might have been hanging around in the corners of the ConocoPhillips office.

We can tell that this executive hasn’t been in college for the past thirty years, because if he had he would know that most college students don’t have their ideals morphed by a ten-second conversation with their peers. Where is the class? Why is this teacher still standing around awkwardly instead of telling them to get the hell out of his classroom?

Then we get to the actual message of the ad itself, which seems to boil down to the phrases “100 years,” “actually it’s cleaner,” and “it provides jobs.” 100 years really isn’t much in the long run, but I’m guessing it was used since it sounds big. I almost definitely won’t survive 100 more years. Environmentalists like the young lady in this commercial tend to take a longer-term look on things though, so 100 years probably shouldn’t mean much to her. The claim that it’s cleaner just reeks of dubiousness. I don’t know if it is true or false, mainly because they don’t pay me to research how clean gas is, but given that it was a big enough deal that they needed to make an advertisement claiming that it is, I would tend to lean towards false. Where’s the proof on that statement?

More importantly, the jobs statement is just hilarious. If an environmentalist isn’t going to be swayed by an appeal to length, she almost certainly isn’t going to be swayed by the fact that there will be more people employed by said corporation that is doing evil. Try to imagine the mental breakthrough that the commercial creator wants her to have. “Oh man, jobs! That means me and my friends can actually eat tonight! If only I get lucky enough to have one!” Jobs are apparently now just as much of a scare tactic as terrorism. The ending phrase of “I might get a job once we graduate!” only furthers that sentiment. ConocoPhillips: Let us keep digging up natural gas or you’ll have no jobs!

Speaking of: what is the deal with these floating words? “CENTURY,” “ENERGY,” “ECONOMY,” and “ENVIRON” — I assume that is supposed to say environment, but it is (likely) as off-screen as the actual environment is to a for-profit corporation. Are these name tags? Can I create my own? Because if I had one while watching this commercial, it would say “BULLSHIT.”

Finally, this:

“I know, I know, you were just being brainwashed by your fellow hippies. Let me deliver the smuggest knowing nod I can for you.”

OH MY GOD THIS HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG!!!

Well, actually, what happened was I bought a new (more accurate) tape measure. The fact that I still lost inches on my thighs and gained them on my biceps gives me some hope, and the two pounds helps a bit as well. So, for a host of reasons, I’m still pretty happy with the diet. It sure would be nice to see those numbers continue to go down next week though.

Meals

7x Turkey Bacon, 3 Organic Eggs, Broccoli, Beans (Breakfast)
14x Pork or Steak Lettuce Wrap with Jalapenos,  Broccoli, Beans (Dinner/Lunch)
4x Chicken, Broccoli, Beans (Lunch x2)
2x Meals out while adhering to the diet (Salmon for one, Grilled Catfish for the other)
3x Cheat meals (Starbucks Java Chip Frappuccino, Subway, BBQ Ribs/French Fries/Fried Okra, and a pint of Peanut Butter Cup Ice Cream)

Exercises

3x Kettlebell lifts. I got up to 55. I’ll do 60 today, and probably keep it there for a week so I can get more used to the reps.
3x Walks

So here we go.

The measurements are giving me a little more hope than the weight. I think I’ve botched the latter by having a meal I shouldn’t have had on each Saturday prior to my weigh-in on Sunday morning. The first being my sister’s birthday, the second being me ordering something at a restaurant grilled, taking it home, and seeing that it was fried.

Well, no matter. I’m feeling pretty good so far. Things are slowly (un)rounding into form.

Meals

- 3 Organic Eggs, turkey bacon, beans, broccoli (x7) — Breakfast
- Steak (or pork), beans, broccoli (x12) — Lunch and Dinner during the week.
- Chicken, beans, broccoli (x4) — Second lunch.
- Eating out, but still conforming to the diet (x2) — Seriously Papadeaux, what kind of restaurant doesn’t have Balsamic Vinaigrette? </#whitewhine>
- Cheat meals (x3) — This Sunday it was six slices of Starburst Star Pizza, a Starbucks java Frappuccino, and three bottles of St. Arnold’s Root Beer. (Honestly, pretty solid for a company that prides itself on regular beer — I would drink regular beer but Sunday is also “Work on FO things day,” and editing drunk is never a good idea.)

Exercises

- Kettlebell reps. I started with 20 and have added five additional reps after every session. I just put down 45 before I started writing this. It is getting easier. (Monday – Wednesday – Friday)
- Walks. Just your basic 30 minute stroll around the neighborhood.  Nothing fancy. (Tuesday – Thursday – Saturday)

It’s been a pretty weird transition the last few months. I love and enjoy my work, yet because of just how quick the transition from “learn during the lockout” to “oh crap, there’s a book out in three weeks!” has been, I feel like I’ve been paddling upstream while I learn how to do my duties to the best of my ability. That goes for many areas of my life right now. I recently decided I want to go back and finish the few credits I need for my B.A., and possibly pursue a Masters or join a Creative Writing program if the financial situation is right. I also am still dealing with the fallout of losing both of my parents, an utter and complete diet change, and a few other alterations to come depending on variables that are out of my control.

One side effect of having columns posted on ESPN and joining the crew of a prolific sports company is that you tend to attract a lot more attention. For instance, I had roughly 350 followers or so when I left SB Nation Houston to join Football Outsiders. That number is now hovering close to 600. The first time Aaron Schatz, my boss (this still feels weird to type), tweeted my Twitter handle, my e-mail inbox exploded.

Now obviously, I’m no stranger to criticism. I actually tend to enjoy it when it’s well-delivered and presented in a non-confrontational manner. I don’t take it personally if it’s not. What I find funny about this is: the more “popular” I become, the less time I really have to care about someone’s grievances with a piece. Not only is this because I have a lot more on my plate, but it’s also because the total volume of the reactions to my piece tend to skew in the negative ways that everything on the internet does, assuming it’s fed enough eyeballs. I find myself sympathizing more and more with … athletes.

I’m not saying that it’s exactly the same thing, because athletes put up with this on a much larger scale, but once you reach a certain amount of time expended and public eyeballs, it becomes really easy to stop giving a shit about who says what. I have a self-awareness about it … I want my work to continually improve after all, but once you’ve copy-edited a certain amount of words in a week on a minimal amount of sleep, there’s only so much of you that cares about it until you can recharge your batteries. If you’re following me, I’m sure you probably follow at least one athlete on Twitter who will tweet these pseudo-inspirational messages. “God is great, blessed,” could be one, or maybe the generic quote about how you can only achieve greatness with hard work. The deeper into this I get, the more these pithy quotes read like “haters gonna hate,” to me. I feel like I understand (even just the slightest bit) what it’s like to actually have a public “celebrity” about you.

For example, we recently did an interview with 18to88. At the end of the interview, Nate casually brings up the fact that an earlier ESPN piece I wrote on the Colts had a pretty regrettable phrase in it: that the Colts fall last year was due to an “aging core,” which has some negative connotations about the performances they put up last year despite the fact that they were mostly pretty good. ESPN pieces get sent up a few chains of command, so not only did that line get off of my desk, it also got past Aaron’s quick run of it and the ESPN editor’s take as well. Obviously, that was poorly phrased and I was more than happy to explain my reasoning behind the line. I’m more than happy to take responsibility for screwing things up: I botched my read of Eric Weddle’s chances of staying in San Diego, called Harry Douglas “Henry Douglas”, and will probably flub a few more times in the future as well while I’m becoming accustomed to the part of the job where I cover the entire NFL, rather than just one team. Great critique by Nate, and presented in a classy way.

Below that in the post comments, we get this: “I think the quality of the product at FO has declined inversely in relation to their attention from the mainstream sports press. It just seems that 5 years ago they would have never thrown out unproveable things like ‘the aging core’ without some rational statistics to back them up.”

That hit me in an interesting place as someone who used to be that guy. Someone who used to critique other sports sites and say some things that probably were a little too far. I don’t think you have to worry about FO’s decline, as it is run by a smart and well-reasoned individual who has a great idea about what he is doing. This McCown guy, on the other hand, he could probably stand to get his shit together a little bit, yeah. You guys didn’t even jump on him for the fact that he didn’t point out Jacob Tamme as a potential successor to Dallas Clark! Aaron should probably light him on fire and go dig up the number of one of those other very talented people that sent in assistant editor applications, as he does in all of my nightmares.

I guess what it comes down to is that when you’re actually trying to create, you really don’t have much time to be bothered by something like this anymore. I woke up at 3 a.m. after a relatively sleepless night, and I finished compiling the predictions post about an hour ago. On a typical day in the season, I’d likely be facing about three pieces to edit on-site that went for ~5,000 words. Instead, my next move is probably going to be to do the routine chores of FO — spam comment deleting, XP’ing interesting things, compiling for Week in Quotes, and checking the mailbag — before moving on to the next ESPN piece and trying to make sure that one comes out better. After that, I have to make some final preparations for a podcast, schedule some appointments, run an errand to the post office, and take care of those pesky normal human ideas like cooking, exercising, and bathing. This is a relatively slow day. Which is why I have time to look at a comment like that and think about it.

All of which is to say: it’s really interesting that becoming more “popular” actually means you interact with readers less and less. I’ll save myself the five minutes of coming up with a good inspirational quote for you via Google. Might still need it.

It hit me when I was ducking out of Thanksgiving on my Mom’s side, primarily because I probably have been harboring too much ill will about them. Deserved though some of the events that caused it may make it seem. I went to go play basketball at a nearby park, and after about 20 minutes, a boy and his father came out and started shooting at the same hoop. I could barely breathe. It brought back forgotten chunks of memories past. Of course there was criticism involved, but there was also an honest desire from my father to make me want to be the best I could be. I’ve spent the last few months viewing him through the prism of sports, primarily because I can’t remember any particularly good memories where that wasn’t somehow involved. YMCA basketball, chucking the football across the street, little league practice. Two of the most exciting events in sports that I can really remember: the Rockets winning the lottery and Barry Bonds breaking Mark McGwire’s record, both were followed by immediately rushing in to tell him.

Part of the problem of human recognition is that while you’re cognitively developing, you don’t really tend to remember things. Combine this with the odd pattern that my parents divorce enforced on us, where I’d trade houses every other day, and memories from that era tend to be focused on Big Things, most of which tend to be Bad Things. You have brief memories of the little nice gestures: sleepovers gone wrong, trips to BookStop. Where you can say something like “Yeah! That’s when I first got into (Lone Wolf Books)!”  The only really good memory I have of my father occurred when I had watched some History Channel special about The End Of The World. Eventually there will be no sun, or a comet will hit us, or overpopulation will ruin the planet. It’s mankind’s very own Choose Your Own Adventure book.

Obviously I couldn’t sleep, and eventually I got up to get some water, waking him up in the process. After some hemming and hawing, he settled down in my room to talk about it a bit. I remember the feeling of reassurance, but I mostly just think of this key passage:

“What happens when we die? Where do we go? What if we just wind up in a cold, distant, nothing?”

“Nobody knows. I guess it depends a lot on where you think it does.”

I haven’t always fallen over myself to write flattering things about my dad. In fact, as much as I wish I could emulate the lyrics “Never thought about the world without you / And I promise that I’ll never say another bad thing about you,” I don’t think that will happen. I’ll always be a little bitter that he gave up and locked himself away in the hills to escape from things rather than face them head on. He knew I was a city boy with no desire for the country life. He just didn’t know that, as much as he enjoyed the wilderness and vacations, he was too.

I hope he thought of a good place to go.

If you are one of the eight or ten people who I feel like are truly fans of my writing, I know that you will be quick to try and defend me and say that I’m being hyper-critical of myself. But don’t. It’s fair to call a bad paragraph a spade. I was still learning the in’s and out’s of being the managing editor of SB Nation Houston, particularly the increased workload and non-creative portions of running the site, when my mom passed away. Grief is a part of every life, and while I would say that I’m not truly over it, nor do I think I ever really will be, I don’t think that excuses the shortcuts and laziness I have felt burrowing within my work over the past few months.

Simply put: in thinking and reading some of the things I’ve written of late, I don’t think I’ve put my best effort forward. I think back to the things I was doing on a weekly basis during the last NFL season. Game charting posts on Battle Red Blog with in-depth analysis, the MS Paint posts I would throw up weekly on SBNH. Even though they were at times formulaic, I feel like there’s so much more creativity in those posts. Yeah, there have been some good flashes lately, and I could hide behind the excuses. I even have, at some points. It is a fact that writing on SBNH is much more rigid and fixed than writing more independently was, particularly when it comes to the news. However, there is also a certain level of creativity and ingenuity that an individual writer can inject into a story on his or her own, a level that starts with a sound mindset and some out-of-the-box ideas. I think that voice has been sorely lacking lately.

Which, again, isn’t to beat myself up. I write this post for two reasons: one is that as critical as I am of other writers, particularly ones that have jobs of higher prestige, it’s important to me to hold myself accountable to the same standards. The other is to self-motivate. I know that I can rev things up and do much better than I have been doing, and the excuses for not doing it are silly and pedantic.

As Steve Alexander is terribly fond of saying: Stay tuned. The ideas are flowing again. I’m ready to let the voice out. It is going to be a fun ride. Even if all I have to talk about are lockouts and the Houston Astros.