Why Should You Volunteer?

Since late 2009 I've been volunteering with a program called BUILD. This organization, veiled in entrepreneurial endeavors, is intended to facilitate the pursuit of underprivileged students toward college; many of whom will be first generations students in their families.

Because these students are early adolescent high schoolers however, it certainly doesn't come without challenges. Romance, drugs, stresses of school work, stresses at home, and popularity routinely pepper the conversations that I overhear and I often catch myself playing parent while forgetting that I'm only but 12 years removed from those same discussions. Yet, despite providing a different perspective than what is fed to them by their parents and teachers, they actually provide me with a sort of 90 minute/week oasis from my own adult stresses. Work, relationships, family; all of these things are pushed away when I'm with these kids.

I can only hope that I'm able to marginally do the same for them.

With that, I figured that I'd share a commercial that we filmed for their business, "Sleep Well Pillows". These are travel pillows that the kids have made by hand and have been selling to friends and family. All of the editing was done by my 10th grade kid, Marco (he's the one that stretches into Bria's face!)

Either way, if you're thinking about volunteering, wherever that may be, I highly recommend it. It'll put a new spin on the way that you see your life, the lives of others, and the intersections between each. And besides, spending my Saturday with them was one of the best afternoons I've had in a long, long time.

When a Child Lies: Something to Consider

Since I haven't posted in while, this certainly isn't meant to shed light on anything; rather, to make you think about the following idea.

One might argue that lying is one of our most primitive forms of self preservation. Similar to a child's natural inclination to say "mine" when challenging another for food, lying presents the opportunity to reliably manipulate any situation into one's own favor. While a worrisome milestone, it's also a milestone indicative of growth and socialization. What I want to explore however, is the sophistication and maturity required to lie on someone else's behalf.

I would submit that most children under the age of 5 are incapable of lying for someone else. No matter how well adjusted, it's simply not a cognitive process that has realized itself. Naturally as that child develops, their understanding of the world around them expands from self-preservation, to collective-preservation. There's the benevolent realization that they cannot survive without the assistance of others. Thus, whether lying on behalf of their best friend who makes English class easier or lying to Child Protective Services because they wish to remain out of foster care, there is a high degree of complexity required to manipulate an externalized situation. So given all of that, what's the motive?

Pfff, I don't know!

But I would certainly love to understand more about the true intentions of a child and how they influence and manage a situation constructed through their own falsehood. Are they innocently destructive in this lie? Constructively cruel? Both? Or neither?

Either way, I would personally find it both comforting and disturbing to learn that my kid is able to externalize a lie. While it would be indicative of better socialization and awareness, it might also imply a trajectory of deception that, if left unattended, could be cultivated into a dangerous personal trait. Clearly my take isn't scientific, but it's certainly something to consider. It's easy to see self-preservation in action, but what exactly is going on when such a young mind is capable of manipulation not only for self, but for others as well?

Twitter: The Next Social Bookmarking Site

Is it me or is Twitter is becoming nothing more than an RSS feed powered by people who I think are interesting? Now, before you bunch your hipster flannels into a wad, I understand that the purpose of The T is to share ideas with the social web in fewer characters than a text message. However, without context around your personal motivations for sharing, how is that any different than a social bookmarking site?

It's not... At least I don't think so... Then what's missing?

Color. WHY exactly are you sharing that link about Dopey Financial Group bringing in a new CEO? Does it affect you? Are you outraged? Tell us what compelled you to click that share button! Though at this point in Twitter's evolution people can deduct when you're simply trying to move traffic to your site or suck up to another user by retweeting their portfolio of blog posts, let me be clear with my idea here:

The mere act of sharing something does not inherently illuminate your motives behind doing so.

A lot of brain neurons fire between the time that we decide to share an article and its final postage to Twitter, but those dots remain vastly disconnected. Clearly your interests are peaked, so why not take that one step further and tell us why. The ubiquity of sharing these days has made way for vain and whimsical "participation" by way of a personalized message board that we figure people want to see. Why then, would you want your sole contribution to the Twitter universe to be a regurtiation of links from CNN, Mashable, and Huffington Post? To each their own, I suppose, but again- If I'm looking for that, I'll just visit Reddit or Digg.

Thoughts?

Lying Makeup

My Torn Achilles

Yep, it's gone. There is a gap in the back of my ankle where the strongest tendon in my body used to be. We're all familiar with the Greek Warrior 'Achilles'; fabled for his unparalleled strength in all parts of his being...expect for his heel. And after taking an arrow to the back of his foot, homeboy was useless.

...Well so am I.

Yesterday while playing a pickup game of flag football down in San Diego, my team was on defense and the play call was for a blitz. This play was just like any other that I'd had over the course of the day as I was perpetually thinking about the best way to avoid injuring my knee. I've had terrible knees for the last few years and whenever I'm doing anything that involves fast movement and directional changes, I have a heightened level of sensitivity around the anchors of my legs. I suppose that would be the second least of my worries.

As the ball was hiked, I planted my foot to begin the play. When I stepped forward, I felt something in the back of my ankle just above my heel; like someone had dropped a weight on me or jumped down on top of my leg. After I fell to the ground, I rolled over to diagnose what had just happened. I looked at my ankle and it wasn't dangling off or anything so all was well there--but then I looked at the area where my leg met the back of my shoe and said "yup, that was my achilles, DAMMIT". Basically there was an air pocket of loose skin where my tendon used to be. Between the fits of pain, racing through my mind were the inconveniences involved with being unable to walk for the foreseeable future.

At this point I'm 36 hours out from the rupture and another 60 hours from my surgery. It was pretty foul listening to the orthopedic specialist describe how they're going slice open the back of my leg, pull down the tendon that has rolled up my calf, and reattach it to what little tendon was left behind my heel.

I guess we'll see how things go over the next few days. I'm 98% immobile and dropping percocets every 5 hours which have been piping me off into a land of disillusioned enchantment full of colorful bubbles and soft sleepy sheep. It could be worse though. I could've torn it while doing something far less cool than playing football.

More to come...

My Short Attention Span ...

...is forcing me to rethink the way that I process the world around me. So how do I return to the good ole days (1990s) when I could actually wait until 6 o'clock for the evening news, wait until half time for sports scores, wait until I was finished with dinner to use the phone, and patiently thumb through encyclopedias to find the largest pinky toe ever recorded?

I can't. And I don't think that I could if I wanted to.

Regardless, here are 5 ways that I know that my attn span is kicking the bucket...

1) My brain is over gratified by perpetual nuggets of "new".

Ever find yourself refreshing a newsfeed or forum page that you just refreshed? Better yet, ever find yourself checking all of your social media communities for updates/notifications and legitimately feeling dejected when you didn't have a new comment or request? Yeh...- Your brain is telling you something.

2) If I see a paragraph with more lines than I can count at a glance, I'm skipping over it.

Who has time to read nowadays?! Well- Everyone I suppose since our faces are always glued to some sort of screen or monitor. Ok, so then who has time to read more than 2 sentences at a time without a break? Coffee Shop Philosophers maybe...? Though they're probably only looking at the pictures.

3) I can't bear to do fewer than 2 things at a time.

Walking and texting. Driving and texting. Talking and typing. Eating and web surfing. Watching TV and status updating. Reading and listening to music. Flying and Wifi-ing. (What'd I miss besides everything?).

4) Soccer... Love to play, hate to watch.

So if two teams are scoreless going into the 89th minute, then I've been watching them kicking a ball around for nothing. If someone scores in stoppage time then that's all that I needed to see...yeah?

5) Two minutes of a song at the bar/club is still too much.

Dear DJs, when playing Too Short's "Blow the Whistle"- feel free to mix things out after, 'what's my favorite word'.

I'm not sure what to do at this point, but I will tell you that I did about 12 other things while writing this. Which reminds me; we always hear that when you're doing multiple things, no ONE thing is ever done well. Case in point, people who walk and text at the same time are shitty pedestrians whom even auto-correct cannot save from sending such gems like, "did the hummus hump the rice".

(Which happened to me yesterday)

City People Directions vs. Non-City People Directions

I thought I'd share a little text message exchange between a friend and I while in pursuit of a local wine store in Arlington, Va.

Me: Where's the vino place?
C-Note: I told u on Clarendon Blvd
Me: That's a long street...
C-Note: Past Orvis
Me: Cross streets are helpful
C-Note: Across from the container store
Me: Where's that? Cross streets are helpful
C-Note: It's right past Orvis before the eye glass store
Me: !!!
C-Note: I don't know. Whatever street is before grocery store and after Cheesecake Factory

*Sigh*

...And notice that she gave me 5 points of reference, none of which are relevant without a cross street. At that rate she may as well just give me an address.