Living a Dream

For a little while now I've been feeling a bit empty. Part of it is the overarching malaise of living in 2018 America. Part of it is being at a crossroads in life and not knowing which way to turn. Part of it is because it's been 90+ degrees outside for most of the past month. There's not really a great answer to all of it, but it's happening. But one of the things that I keep thinking about is how I think I'd like to start drawing. Or painting. Or something. I want to make visual art, but I'm completely terrified of it. What's more, I don't think I consider my own artistic pursuits to be "good" enough to actually pursue. I explored this idea a little bit on an Instagram post where I edited a photo, and it has kept me thinking further about this. With words, I don't have any issues with confidence, and that means I don't second-guess what I said. Even if I say something that pisses people off, I have confidence in the fact that I (...

Boy, it's been tough to catch my breath this week. This week saw a LOT of words go to NBA articles of mine. Two ended up getting published - this one and this one - and a third one hasn't yet seen the light of day because it needs to be reconfigured after the NBA trade deadline. The three of them were about 4500 words total, so that's something. Additionally, we've been dog-sitting for a german shepherd who spent her first 18 hours in our home strengthening every negative connotation I had of german shepherds. She effectively didn't stop whining even once the first night, while also occasionally barking like a lunatic and keeping us up all night. She's also super-high energy, which is fine if you're not used to having a dog that's part dog and part ottoman, like this angel. At any rate, the week has turned into waking up earlier than normal, throwing a ball 20x in the backyard, going for a 2+ mile walk, throwing the ball again as soon as I get...

At some point in college, it dawned on me that my group of friends from home was unusual. Yes, we were all weirdly close an did some objectively strange things to each other (and with each other, but mainly to each other), but apparently it was weird to stay so close to people from your hometown. We all thought nothing of it, because that's just the way we were. Others, however, were surprised and often confused. Some of them were "adopted" into the group of us from the Chesterland area, and it's hard to say how much they still stayed in touch with people who didn't go to high school with us, because they sure assimilated into our friends-since-early-childhood clique. But still, that was only college. Later, I moved to Chicago and found that there were people who I hadn't seen in years who would gladly, willingly, almost eagerly bail me out of I was in a pinch or needed a place to stay. These were people I wasn't even necessarily close  with when we were...

As is common in this challenge, yesterday's 1000 words went to the NBA . Today's thousand, however, are headed back here. Writing a lot has this curious effect where it makes you think about writing a lot. For me, I was at work yesterday (tutoring English, but there weren't a lot of students) and started working on the above-mentioned basketball article. It was kind of a slog. Sometimes basketball writing takes a lot of time and effort, because it can't just be off-the-cuff ideas. It has to make sense: If I'm suggesting that two teams make a trade, the trade has to be viable, the salaries have to match, the players have to be relatively good fits on the other team, and their productivity needs to be taken into account. As such, I can't just suggest a trade in 5 minutes and write 300 words on it. So yesterday, like I said, I was working on that article. People at work kept popping in to chat because it was a slow day all around, which led to me not getting th...

This is a big day. This is a big blog post. This is my first time writing from my newly decorated desk/office space in the basement of my house. I learned a while ago that I have a tough time focusing on writing if I don't have a dedicated place to do that writing. It's fine to sit on the couch and write about a basketball game that I'm currently watching, but it's very hard to sit and write about something meaningful while relaxing on the couch. My brain is wired to use couch-time as leisure time, meaning I will browse Twitter or a thousand other sites instead of actually paying attention to what I'm "supposed to" be writing about. Last week I got a desk from a friend of mine and plunked it in the corner of our basement. I sat down at the desk and I wrote. It went pretty well. The desk is small - about 40 inches across and 18 deep, according to my unbelievably bad spatial reasoning - and I truly just put it in the corner and sat down. But I wanted mor...

I've had a blank document open on my laptop for over an hour now. I've been browsing the internet, leaving the room, walking the dog, and looking at basketball stats for a new NBA article (my 1000 words yesterday went to another Cavs basketball article at Hashtag Basketball ). After finally starting to write, and completing the first paragraph, I managed to sidetrack myself for another 15 minutes. Even when I came back to write the previous sentence, I almost clicked to a new Chrome tab instead of pressing on into this sentence. The point of this is that writing can be really hard. It seems like it would be easy - just write whatever is on your mind - but how often is what's on our mind a coherent thought? Rarely, right? Our thoughts zip around from the episode of Parks & Rec we watched yesterday to that dog we saw across the street to a video we saw on Facebook to oh man I just burped to I wonder if my Prime delivery is going to arrive today or tomorrow. Weirdly,...

Yesterday's 1000 words went to Hashtag Basketball , so I'm three for three. Today is feeling a little tougher, so today I'm going to try something different. At home I have something called " Story Cubes ," which are 6-sided dice with an image on each side. The idea is that you roll the dice and make up a story using all nine words. Typically you start with "Once upon a time..." It's somewhere between a party game and a creative activity. Since I'm at work (on a slow day) and the dice are at home, I'm going to use a 9-word generation from RandomWordGenerator.com and make up a story. This should be weird. I'm setting the max number of syllables per word at 4. Here's the list: Story, translate, popular, smell, bloody, rule, authorise (with an S?! I'm gonna change that), variation, volunteer. The goal will be to start typing in a moment and create the entire story in one fell swoop, but if a student comes in, I'll have to ...

This one hurts. We've been fostering a dog named Ginger for the past two weeks. I've always been reluctant to foster dogs because I love dogs so much that it hurts. I love dogs for all the reasons anyone loves dogs, except I'm just a big dope and love them a little extra. Jenna has always wanted to do this and I've always resisted because I knew that I'd get too attached to having an extra dog in the house. We've done kittens, which is a lot of fun, and I've never had quite that feeling. With kittens, there are always multiples so it always feels like a bit too much to handle in the long-term. Also, they're just babies so they haven't gotten used to any kind of life (only partially true, I realize) and I know that once they go to their adoptive homes, they'll be there for a long time. But then there's Ginger. We thought about fostering a dog because our dog, Hachi, gets kind of lonely and he loves cold weather. However, we humans love c...

I don't actually know if I'll publish all of these, but the idea is to write 1,000 words per weekday over at least the next month. They won't all be here on my blog - they can be independent projects (books and the like) or more likely, basketball articles - but the idea is to get words on a document and see where they go. Writing can be hard. It's hard to focus on an idea unless I have a real  idea to start with. Just typing until something comes out feels like cheating or like it shouldn't count for anything, because I didn't go in with a purpose. But I guess writing is   the purpose, so it can't be a failure. Countless people will say that the trick to writing is to just start doing it. I'm hoping that's the case here, but so far it's not doing a whole lot. In life news, I went skiing today. I grew up less than 5 miles from a ski "resort" and yet I never skied there. Ever. My brothers skied, my friends skied, and my dad even sk...

When I was in college I had a nonfiction writing class with a woman named Diana Hume George. I've thought about her more than most any of my professors over the years and I'm 100% sure she doesn't remember me at all. I found a couple of the essays I wrote in her class and I'd like to go back in time and thank her for not failing me because, wow, those were trash. In any case, she had us do an activity that I love. I loved it then and I love it now. I force it on students of mine when they get writer's block on an essay and I tried to encourage a couple of my Italian students to use it as well. Here's how it worked: Five minutes and a prompt. She would give a prompt like "I remember the last time I..." or "I always liked the sound of..." and she would tap a tuning fork. Your pencil was on the paper when the tuning fork dinged and it was not to leave the paper until she dinged it again five minutes later. It didn't matter if it was cohe...

Hey Mrs. D. It's been a while, I know. I'd be lying if I said I thought about you often, and I have no idea if this letter will find you doing well or not, but it came to me as I was walking home from a lesson. An English lesson. In Italy, where I'm teaching English lessons as a form of making a living. I have a bit of a bone to pick with you, Mrs. D. It's nothing personal (although you told me I'd never be a good writer, and I'd be happy to write you a letter that really shows emotion and conveys a central theme about whether or not I can write a letter that shows emotion and conveys a central theme), I just think you did a disservice by pounding the rules of grammar into our heads to such an insane degree. Yes, I realize it was funny to have to write "To plus a verb is an infinitive" a crazy amount of times as punishment for misinterpreting a verb form while diagramming sentences. And yes, I realize that that's a fairly important rule. But I ...

So yes, the plan was to just travel as much as we could before we knew our schedules. During the first couple of weeks there was a lot of emailing, interviewing, and finding out what we might be doing for work. It came slowly, and the stress of not knowing where we could work and what exactly we would be doing motivated us to take short breaks in the form of weekend trips. A quick Google-Flight search showed us round-trip airfare to Brussels for about 40 euros per person. Again, that's round-trip. So that's how we settled on Brussels, and we knew next to nothing about the city.. The first course of action was to peruse wikitravel, which told us some things to see and do. Second course was to ask a friend of mine who lived in Brussels for quite some time, and he gave us a suggestion of a place or two to eat. Some time around noon on September 14th, we flew over the Alps and discovered that this was going to be a whole year of unbelievable new things. Our flight lande...

To try justifying that post-title, I want you to consider something with me that I've not really delved into. Most of this blog has been about bits and pieces of the teaching experience and I haven't really done much to tell you about the 20 weekend trips we've taken to the 10 different countries we've now visited. That's partly selfish of me (for not telling you) and partly unselfish of me (for not rubbing it in anyone's face).  I want to make a slight change. I want to tell you about these things, but I want to do it in the right way. A lot of times I make jokes, and a lot of times I downplay important things (hi, I'm a defense mechanism, what are you?), but I want everyone to experience the things that I've been lucky enough to experience. So in order to make that happen, I'm going to make myself vulnerable.  See, the theme of this entire trip/move/experience has been to grab life by its metaphorical horns and really do something when the c...

Have you guys ever read The Odyssey? You probably have. It's long, Greek, and there are about 75000 names used in it over the course of seemingly a thousand pages. You might also remember it for things like Calypso, a whirlpool, Polyphemus the cyclops, Sirens, and various people being murdered for various things, not to mention the tail-end of the Trojan War being recounted within its pages. The reason it might sound familiar but not-that-familiar is that most people seem to be reading this book between the ages of about 12 and 16. This is one of the most loaded books in the history of ever, and it's complicated enough just to follow the plot (Homer, the author, invented the concept of in medias res , where the story begins in the middle and jumps around a bit through flashbacks and such, a style now known as "The Tarantino" or as "the way that one guy makes those weird movies with lots of violence"), let alone follow all the names involved, the historical...

As a warning, I would've written this same thing before starting to teach, but it popped into my head today after a quick lesson with a youngster. Bear in mind that these lessons with kids are not as simple as they would be if we both spoke the same language, so the Italian-to-English hurdle surely gives rise to some less-than-ideal conditions for the kids, which makes them more apt to act out. I have parenting advice. I mean, I have for a while, and I have lots of pieces, and I know that I won't be the perfect parent (although I'll be a hell of a lot better than some of the monsters I've come across in my life), and I'm not pretending to have all of the answers. I'm shooting for one big one right now. Teach your effing kid to play fairly. If for no other reason than it preventing his or her English tutor from getting real pissy and writing a blog post immediately after a lesson. This little kid is actually really adorable. The first fifteen minutes was as...

I don't have a lot of tangible fears. I'm not trying to be a tough guy, but I don't have legitimate phobias or anything like that. In fact, I'm not a tough guy, I just don't think I have a lot of tangible fears. But now and then one will come to mind - and it just did about eight seconds ago - for no good reason I am terrified that all my dreams will come true and I will feel more isolated than ever. If you know me really well, you might know that I dabble in depression-related thoughts now and then - you could say "light depression," not unlike "light treason." Sometimes it's actually depressing, sometimes it's looking at depressing things when I feel fine to see how I might remedy them if I'm actually down in the dumps. Point is, for myriad reasons, I have moments where I feel totally isolated, as I imagine most anyone does. But I was watching Parks and Rec a few minutes ago and thinking about how much I'd love to be on a show l...

Sometimes I think all day about something I want to write when I get home. It might be something funny that I saw/heard/read/took in by using one of my senses. It doesn't have to be funny...it could elicit any emotion, really. Or it might be something that I just kinda thought up during the day and wanted to elaborate on. What invariably happens is that I think about it during the day, lose some steam on what I wanted to really get into, talk for about 20 minutes with someone about that thing, and don't bother writing it. So where does that leave me? It leaves me with a good conversation and nothing to write about. It's a blessing and a curse. Curse because I like writing and generally want to write about these things I think up. And blessing because I'm not so painfully alone that I have no one to talk to and am forced to write it out instead. (Not that I'm suggesting that all writers are the lonely/reclusive type...but have you seen most of these jokers?) Here...

Dear Couple Sitting in Front of Me on the Train, Let me start by saying that I believe that love, in all its forms, is an inherently beautiful thing. I believe that it is an important thing in a human's life to find someone who understands their neurosis, but beyond that, someone who actually enjoys it. It's wonderful to think there are people out there who want nothing more than to make you happy. But that's not what this is about. This is about your cutesy/lovey/nuzzling games that you played for 13 stops - aka 24 minutes. First of all, yes, I said it's great to have someone who understands you, but that someone should also understand that you both look like complete and utter assholes. I'm fine with having your arm around someone, but you (girl, who I'm now naming Megan) actually took the initiative to sit up straight, turn toward guy (who I'm naming Kyle), and properly give him a legitimate hug on an extremely crowded 1:30 A.M. train. My initia...

Baby, don't hurt me . Sorry about that. This entry should really fall under the "makes you wonder" category and thus the other blog, but it's something that I've been thinking about since moving to Chicago, so it stays here - as this is the Chicago/entertainment world/whatever it is blog. I was on the bus home from the first time I've ever done improv on a stage in front of people who weren't my classmates (went alright, more nerve wracking than I expected) and I got to thinking. Over the last month or so I've had to say goodbye to an awful lot of people. Not permanent goodbyes, thankfully, as I think I've done a pretty good job keeping up with most of them. These people are my closest friends and family and they mean the world to me. So when I tell these people that I love them, it comes as no surprise. They say it back in most cases, and we go on our way. But we never stop and try to articulate it. There were at least two people who I had planne...

I'm not trying to be manly, but I don't consider myself as the type who is afraid of a lot of things. I'm not afraid of heights, spiders, truck drivers, or even Germans. So I'm not going to write a post titled "fear" and tell you all about any kind of standard fear (like my fear of dirty dish-water and how when I touch it, it triggers my gag-reflex). Nor will I pretend I'm great because I went skydiving on Sunday. Yes, it was completely insane. And no, I'll not soon forget it. And yes, I get sick on roller coasters but still thought this was a good idea. That's not the kind of fear I'm talking about. I do have one or two very real fears, though. I want to try to dig into one of them. We'll see how this goes. I have a paralyzing fear of being like everyone else. Anyone reading this, whether you know me well, have only met me in passing, or only know who I am because you stumbled upon this and have never met me in a face-to-face environment, ...