This morning I am not doing something I usually do with relentless precision on a Saturday: I am not going to the office. Nope. Instead the Missus and me are road tripping down the Shore (where even on a Saturday morning everything is alright) so I can run in the Manasquan Turkey Trot.
The Turkey Trot is a 5 mile run that a number of local businesses in 'Squan sponsor and from which they donate the proceeds (the entry fee was $25.00) to local charities and not-for-profit organizations. All participants also are asked to bring a non-perishable food item with us, which is going to be entrusted to the good people from local food banks to help ensure that those who are in need will have food on their table on Thanksgiving. It is a little thing but it reminds me that for all we have endured in our family during the past twelve months, we can be thankful that are fortunate enough again this year to be in a position to help another family whose fortune has been more "mis" than hit.
I have only run this distance - 5 miles - one other time in my life. I did so Thursday morning. I stretched out my pre-work run 'NTSG to the race distance. I did so because - as a firm believer in the power of the mind to control the body - I wanted to have completed it at least one time prior to this morning so that my mind now knows that my body is capable of making this distance. This morning there will no doubt be times when a lot of different parts of me will hurt and ache. My knees ache even when I am sitting at my desk so I am confident that I shall hear from them on more than one occasion during the race. But having already made this distance (albeit with a lot fewer people around) my mind will be able to keep my body moving forward.
We who shall trot have caught a break. It is supposed to be in the mid 50's and sunny at race time this morning along the Shore. Ideal weather for chasing all those silly New York virgins and the other 1500 folks who will no doubt be between me and the finish line throughout the race.
And in my mind's eye I shall carry a picture of my inspiration. When I am feeling tired and wondering how far I am from the finish I will simply ask myself, "What Would Tammy Do?" knowing in my heart the question's answer before the question itself is even asked: Run.
I shall Tammy. I shall. Maybe after the holidays, we will come visit you at the zoo.
-AK
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Reshuffling of the Buffaloes
Last night with the Alma mater on ESPN against Oklahoma State and up eleven in the second half, I went to sleep. Unbeknownst to me, I was a contagion. Ralphie's road warriors went from 11 up in the third quarter to 3 down at the final whistle. For this group of kids and the adults who coach them, snatching defeat out of victory's jaws has become a most unfortunate and acquired skill.
Four years ago, long after then-coach Barnett had become a bit of an eyesore to the University (Google "Katie Hnida" or "Colorado recruiting scandal") but only shortly after his teams had started to not get it done on the field, CU fired him. It hired a man generally regarded as one of the bright young minds in college football to replace him. And when Dan Hawkins brought his family with him and migrated down to Boulder from the blue fields of Boise Idaho there was much rejoicing along the Front Range of Colorado.
Today there is not any rejoicing along the Front Range when the subject is CU football. Last night, the Hawk's team did something that his teams have done two out of every three times they have taken the field over the past four seasons: they lost. Hawkins has coached forty-eight games as the Buffs' head coach and has only won sixteen of them. If he batted in the #3 hole in the Yankees order, a .333 average would be laudable - assuring base runners aplenty for Kate Hudson's main man to drive in. He of course does not hold that job. And, of course, in his present position the laws of Meatloaf do not apply.
And of course in the big-time business that is intercollegiate athletics, there are those who are CU fans, CU alums and CU boosters ($$$$) who not only no longer want Hawkins coaching in Boulder, but are not shy about saying so. Here in the first decade of this century, it has become vogue to attack those with whom we are disappointed - including men and women who earn a living coaching intercollegiate athletics by attacking not only their achievements or lack thereof but them and their families. Most of the truly valorous attack through the last bastion of the courageous: the Internet message board where the bravado that anonymity provides masks the cowardice of many.
Hawkins has become a popular target on-line with a number of sites having been created for the sole purpose of demanding his head on a platter (http://firedanhawk.blogspot.com/ is among them). There is even a Facebook group devoted to his demise. Does he deserve to lose his job for the abject failure to produce results on the field? In my opinion, yes. In this - his fourth year - he has not produced a single winning season. Here in Aught-Nine they are three and eight with a ninth loss almost assuredly staring them in the face next Friday morning when Nebraska comes to Boulder for the season finale. But does he deserve to be castrated publicly on the way out the door and have his family thrown into the mix as well (remember that his son is a CU student and the #2 quarterback on the football team)? No.
Somewhere along the line in this country the train jumped the track. We lost the ability to discern the difference between legitimate criticism and personal attack. Maybe it was at the moment we decided that we needed 8000 outlets at which to get news and information 24 hours a day - only to discover after we had secured the satellite space that no one would tune in at 1:58 a.m. for the crop report unless we jazzed it up a bit. Invective replaced intellect in certain circles and the latter has shown little ability to regain its bargaining position. Suddenly, simple issue-based disagreement is not enough any more. We need to be willing to scream out what we feel and if you should have the audacity to disagree with me, then to scream even louder and even longer.
I anticipate that at some point between this very morning in Boulder and next Friday morning in Boulder the man who hired Hawkins four years ago will announce to a room of media types that he has fired him. And I anticipate that cheers of "Good riddance" will rise up throughout Boulder and on Internet message boards all over the country. Lost in the noise shall be the fact that while Hawkins has failed in this job, he has not done so due to lack of effort or lack of caring about the University or his team. He has simply failed. It happens. Good people perform less than ideally every day. Contrary to popular belief, it does not make them the Devil incarnate. It makes them human.
And it makes us a little less so when we unsnap our skull caps and between our ears reveal the gap left by where that part of our brain has been removed. Good people fail. Learn to understand it and accept it. There is a remedy for the problem, one that the University will likely explore without further delay. And then this guy will have become the 'old guy' and the new guy will become "the Man", embraced by all and loved by the masses.....
.....and the wheels on the bus shall keep on going round and round, round and round.
-AK
Four years ago, long after then-coach Barnett had become a bit of an eyesore to the University (Google "Katie Hnida" or "Colorado recruiting scandal") but only shortly after his teams had started to not get it done on the field, CU fired him. It hired a man generally regarded as one of the bright young minds in college football to replace him. And when Dan Hawkins brought his family with him and migrated down to Boulder from the blue fields of Boise Idaho there was much rejoicing along the Front Range of Colorado.
Today there is not any rejoicing along the Front Range when the subject is CU football. Last night, the Hawk's team did something that his teams have done two out of every three times they have taken the field over the past four seasons: they lost. Hawkins has coached forty-eight games as the Buffs' head coach and has only won sixteen of them. If he batted in the #3 hole in the Yankees order, a .333 average would be laudable - assuring base runners aplenty for Kate Hudson's main man to drive in. He of course does not hold that job. And, of course, in his present position the laws of Meatloaf do not apply.
And of course in the big-time business that is intercollegiate athletics, there are those who are CU fans, CU alums and CU boosters ($$$$) who not only no longer want Hawkins coaching in Boulder, but are not shy about saying so. Here in the first decade of this century, it has become vogue to attack those with whom we are disappointed - including men and women who earn a living coaching intercollegiate athletics by attacking not only their achievements or lack thereof but them and their families. Most of the truly valorous attack through the last bastion of the courageous: the Internet message board where the bravado that anonymity provides masks the cowardice of many.
Hawkins has become a popular target on-line with a number of sites having been created for the sole purpose of demanding his head on a platter (http://firedanhawk.blogspot.com/ is among them). There is even a Facebook group devoted to his demise. Does he deserve to lose his job for the abject failure to produce results on the field? In my opinion, yes. In this - his fourth year - he has not produced a single winning season. Here in Aught-Nine they are three and eight with a ninth loss almost assuredly staring them in the face next Friday morning when Nebraska comes to Boulder for the season finale. But does he deserve to be castrated publicly on the way out the door and have his family thrown into the mix as well (remember that his son is a CU student and the #2 quarterback on the football team)? No.
Somewhere along the line in this country the train jumped the track. We lost the ability to discern the difference between legitimate criticism and personal attack. Maybe it was at the moment we decided that we needed 8000 outlets at which to get news and information 24 hours a day - only to discover after we had secured the satellite space that no one would tune in at 1:58 a.m. for the crop report unless we jazzed it up a bit. Invective replaced intellect in certain circles and the latter has shown little ability to regain its bargaining position. Suddenly, simple issue-based disagreement is not enough any more. We need to be willing to scream out what we feel and if you should have the audacity to disagree with me, then to scream even louder and even longer.
I anticipate that at some point between this very morning in Boulder and next Friday morning in Boulder the man who hired Hawkins four years ago will announce to a room of media types that he has fired him. And I anticipate that cheers of "Good riddance" will rise up throughout Boulder and on Internet message boards all over the country. Lost in the noise shall be the fact that while Hawkins has failed in this job, he has not done so due to lack of effort or lack of caring about the University or his team. He has simply failed. It happens. Good people perform less than ideally every day. Contrary to popular belief, it does not make them the Devil incarnate. It makes them human.
And it makes us a little less so when we unsnap our skull caps and between our ears reveal the gap left by where that part of our brain has been removed. Good people fail. Learn to understand it and accept it. There is a remedy for the problem, one that the University will likely explore without further delay. And then this guy will have become the 'old guy' and the new guy will become "the Man", embraced by all and loved by the masses.....
.....and the wheels on the bus shall keep on going round and round, round and round.
-AK
Thursday, November 19, 2009
When It's Time to Face the Face
I have friends who have expressed surprise at the fact that I have "embraced" the concept of social networking sites. Notwithstanding that my "embrace" has been something slightly less rigid than that of two middle schoolers at the 7th grade Valentine's Day dance slow-dancing to "Endless Love" and significantly less passionate than those two same two kids at the junior prom bumping and grinding to "Milkshake". Actually, it is the surprise expressed by some who know me that has - in fact - surprised me.
With scant few exceptions I live my life with the rest of the world at (as a bare minimum) arm's length. And I am not satisfied to use my own arm as the measuring stick. Nope. I like an arm with some honest to goodness length to it. If you are not going to go big, then why go at all. Right? And I suspect that in the collective heart of most of us who utilize an outlet such as Facebook do so in large part because it is clean. We control those with whom we interact and the amount of interaction we have with one another. It is the Home Office for Artifice. We are afforded the means to drop in and out of the lives of others in whom we are interested whenever we want to. We can view one another's photographs, remark on one another's great life adventures and assess one another's progress to date from the comfort - no the safety - of our own homes or offices or wherever.
I have noticed a great number of folks who do things via "Facebook Mobile", which I must confess I find a bit unsettling. Principally because I have no idea how to do it but secondarily because I can envision the future client I shall have to defend who caused an eleven-car accident on Route 17 North because he was updating his Facebook status "stuck in traffic again :(" on his I Phone or Blackberry when he veered into oncoming traffic. You think I am kidding? I would wager a year's salary that by this time next year I have handled at least one such case.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I enjoy the ease and convenience of Facebook quite a bit. While it unnerved both of them I am sure - Suz always having been the more vocal of the two kids - Margaret and I both joined the Facebook generation and ended up as friends with both Rob and Suzanne. The process involved a series of negotiations that ended up with a Code of Conduct that follows faithfully the Vegas model but it eventually got completed. The two generations give one another a particularly wide berth on-line but each knows the other is out there.
In addition to finding an easy way to add to my kids' future psychotherapy bills, Facebook has proven itself to be an effective way to reconnect with folks long lost across the ether of time. It has been helpful in organizing events for groups of friends as well. For all of those reasons, its enjoyments have outnumbered its annoyances for me. In large part, it works for me because.....well, because it works for me. It helped me find and/or pointed me directly towards the overwhelming majority of folks I have connected and/or reconnected with on-line. It has been a great relationship for me: I have done little and reaped the benefits of its work.
Lately though I have noticed a darker, more sinister side of this entity. It seems that every time I sign on and access my "Home" page I have a snarky little suggestion or two in the upper right hand corner. Usually it is something beseeching me to "make Facebook a little better for....[insert name here]", imploring me to talk to someone because "you and [insert name here] have not spoken on Facebook in a while" or recruiting me to help make a particular individual more "popular", "[Insert name here] does not have many friends, help him/her find more."
What? Memo to the fourteen year-old kid who undoubtedly created this monstrosity and has made more money from it while sporting a mouthful of baby teeth than I will make in my lifetime: I am not interested. Me and others like me are "socializing" here perhaps because we are too damn lazy or too damn disinterested to do so with one another in person. Or - and I could be the only person who suffers from this infirmity but I suspect I am not - we have neither the time nor the means to see face-to-face all of our family and friends whenever we want to, which makes running into them on-line a boon for all concerned. Regardless of why we choose to be here, little Facebook fellow, what the hell makes you think that while I am there - doing nothing productive - I want to be recruited to do a bit of pro bono work for you? Let me disabuse you of that notion right now.
I struggle - often without success - trying to figure out out how to make the real world a better place for those I know and love. I would not pretend to have the skill set to improve someone's "Facebook world" (although here is a start - either stop playing all those god damned games or combine all of them into one so that goats and goldfish are armed to the hooves and the gills with weapons galore, busting caps in the bejeweled asses of one another and all of the other residents - celebrity and otherwise - of mobster city). Moreover, while I have been rightly accused of having a gargantuan ego I am not deluded enough to believe I have the power to make one person befriend another. Nor do I have the bank account to do so.
Oh - final memo to little computer guru Facebook creator: it is true that I have not spoken lately to Margaret Bozzomo Kenny lately on Facebook. I think the fact that I do so every morning and every night has allowed us to stay sufficiently connected. Thanks for putting her on the virtual milk carton for me but you can disband the posse. I found her just fine. It turns out she was never lost at all.
:)
-AK
With scant few exceptions I live my life with the rest of the world at (as a bare minimum) arm's length. And I am not satisfied to use my own arm as the measuring stick. Nope. I like an arm with some honest to goodness length to it. If you are not going to go big, then why go at all. Right? And I suspect that in the collective heart of most of us who utilize an outlet such as Facebook do so in large part because it is clean. We control those with whom we interact and the amount of interaction we have with one another. It is the Home Office for Artifice. We are afforded the means to drop in and out of the lives of others in whom we are interested whenever we want to. We can view one another's photographs, remark on one another's great life adventures and assess one another's progress to date from the comfort - no the safety - of our own homes or offices or wherever.
I have noticed a great number of folks who do things via "Facebook Mobile", which I must confess I find a bit unsettling. Principally because I have no idea how to do it but secondarily because I can envision the future client I shall have to defend who caused an eleven-car accident on Route 17 North because he was updating his Facebook status "stuck in traffic again :(" on his I Phone or Blackberry when he veered into oncoming traffic. You think I am kidding? I would wager a year's salary that by this time next year I have handled at least one such case.
At the risk of being misunderstood, I enjoy the ease and convenience of Facebook quite a bit. While it unnerved both of them I am sure - Suz always having been the more vocal of the two kids - Margaret and I both joined the Facebook generation and ended up as friends with both Rob and Suzanne. The process involved a series of negotiations that ended up with a Code of Conduct that follows faithfully the Vegas model but it eventually got completed. The two generations give one another a particularly wide berth on-line but each knows the other is out there.
In addition to finding an easy way to add to my kids' future psychotherapy bills, Facebook has proven itself to be an effective way to reconnect with folks long lost across the ether of time. It has been helpful in organizing events for groups of friends as well. For all of those reasons, its enjoyments have outnumbered its annoyances for me. In large part, it works for me because.....well, because it works for me. It helped me find and/or pointed me directly towards the overwhelming majority of folks I have connected and/or reconnected with on-line. It has been a great relationship for me: I have done little and reaped the benefits of its work.
Lately though I have noticed a darker, more sinister side of this entity. It seems that every time I sign on and access my "Home" page I have a snarky little suggestion or two in the upper right hand corner. Usually it is something beseeching me to "make Facebook a little better for....[insert name here]", imploring me to talk to someone because "you and [insert name here] have not spoken on Facebook in a while" or recruiting me to help make a particular individual more "popular", "[Insert name here] does not have many friends, help him/her find more."
What? Memo to the fourteen year-old kid who undoubtedly created this monstrosity and has made more money from it while sporting a mouthful of baby teeth than I will make in my lifetime: I am not interested. Me and others like me are "socializing" here perhaps because we are too damn lazy or too damn disinterested to do so with one another in person. Or - and I could be the only person who suffers from this infirmity but I suspect I am not - we have neither the time nor the means to see face-to-face all of our family and friends whenever we want to, which makes running into them on-line a boon for all concerned. Regardless of why we choose to be here, little Facebook fellow, what the hell makes you think that while I am there - doing nothing productive - I want to be recruited to do a bit of pro bono work for you? Let me disabuse you of that notion right now.
I struggle - often without success - trying to figure out out how to make the real world a better place for those I know and love. I would not pretend to have the skill set to improve someone's "Facebook world" (although here is a start - either stop playing all those god damned games or combine all of them into one so that goats and goldfish are armed to the hooves and the gills with weapons galore, busting caps in the bejeweled asses of one another and all of the other residents - celebrity and otherwise - of mobster city). Moreover, while I have been rightly accused of having a gargantuan ego I am not deluded enough to believe I have the power to make one person befriend another. Nor do I have the bank account to do so.
Oh - final memo to little computer guru Facebook creator: it is true that I have not spoken lately to Margaret Bozzomo Kenny lately on Facebook. I think the fact that I do so every morning and every night has allowed us to stay sufficiently connected. Thanks for putting her on the virtual milk carton for me but you can disband the posse. I found her just fine. It turns out she was never lost at all.
:)
-AK
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
T Plus 365
On this very day - one year ago - Margaret and I sat in a chapel in Georgia and watched Rob and his brothers (and sisters) in arms cross over the threshold from candidate to member. He took his first steps as a duly sworn member of a group he hopes and intends to spend his entire professional career keeping company with - putting into effect and into action lessons that he had spent the previous 17 1/2 weeks learning. Hell, in some cases lessons that he had spent his entire life to that point learning.
Today marks the first anniversary of what I believed at the time to have been the happiest day of my life as his father - the day when I watched him start to put his dream into action. And watched him take the first steps on the path that he has chosen to pursue. A path that he loved then. And a path that he loves now more than he even did then. And a path that I trust shall serve him as faithfully and loyally as he shall serve it for the duration of his career.
In one year a lot has changed for him and a great deal of change - not all of it positive - has been brought to bear on his day-to-day life. In a world far closer to perfect than the only one we are ever given the chance to roam, he would have spent the first year on this journey a bit closer to home than Cheyenne, Wyoming. But - as the poet laureate Townsend once observed - either way blood flows. (Or perhaps it was the future poet laureate Schreiber who made that observation. Depending upon the lighting, the two can be very easily mistaken for one another.) Regardless of its origin, its veracity is undeniable.
Geography has proven to be - at least for those of us at the home office - something to which we try not to devote too much energy or towards which we direct too much anger. I measured while we were in Wyoming in July. In spite of all of my enraged swearing devoted towards making it move closer to New Jersey, it moved east not at all. Just to be certain, I conducted another experiment after we returned home. Nope. Screaming at New Jersey to be closer to Wyoming caused no movement whatsoever on any of the relevant continental plates located here on the East Coast either.
One year ago, in the company of my wife/his mother, able to see him take those first few steps on his journey with my own two eyes I believed that I was happier than I could ever be - both for him and because of him. I know not all that he has learned in the time it took the planet to jog one lap around the Sun. But I know one lesson that that I have learned. I was not close. Not at all. And I have never been happier to be wrong in my life.
-AK
Today marks the first anniversary of what I believed at the time to have been the happiest day of my life as his father - the day when I watched him start to put his dream into action. And watched him take the first steps on the path that he has chosen to pursue. A path that he loved then. And a path that he loves now more than he even did then. And a path that I trust shall serve him as faithfully and loyally as he shall serve it for the duration of his career.
In one year a lot has changed for him and a great deal of change - not all of it positive - has been brought to bear on his day-to-day life. In a world far closer to perfect than the only one we are ever given the chance to roam, he would have spent the first year on this journey a bit closer to home than Cheyenne, Wyoming. But - as the poet laureate Townsend once observed - either way blood flows. (Or perhaps it was the future poet laureate Schreiber who made that observation. Depending upon the lighting, the two can be very easily mistaken for one another.) Regardless of its origin, its veracity is undeniable.
Geography has proven to be - at least for those of us at the home office - something to which we try not to devote too much energy or towards which we direct too much anger. I measured while we were in Wyoming in July. In spite of all of my enraged swearing devoted towards making it move closer to New Jersey, it moved east not at all. Just to be certain, I conducted another experiment after we returned home. Nope. Screaming at New Jersey to be closer to Wyoming caused no movement whatsoever on any of the relevant continental plates located here on the East Coast either.
One year ago, in the company of my wife/his mother, able to see him take those first few steps on his journey with my own two eyes I believed that I was happier than I could ever be - both for him and because of him. I know not all that he has learned in the time it took the planet to jog one lap around the Sun. But I know one lesson that that I have learned. I was not close. Not at all. And I have never been happier to be wrong in my life.
-AK
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
We Are A Long Way From Peach Baskets
If I were to tell you that by the time you arrive at your office this morning (well, presuming you are a tad closer to normal than yours truly), two institutions of higher learning that call the State of Concrete Gardens home will have either finished or be in the late stages of a men's basketball game against one another, you would likely wrestle one another for the chance to hold me down and measure my hair growth at my lobotomy scar. While many a fertile opportunity will likely present itself for such pseudo Greco-Roman amusement, today is not in fact one such opportunity.
This morning @ 3:00 a.m. - an hour some refer to as ungodly while others consider it an ideal time for a morning run (beauty and beholder's eyes and all of that) - the Monmouth University Hawks hopped on a bus at their campus in West Long Branch, New Jersey and migrated north. They shall travel north to Jersey City and the campus of St. Peter's College in order to play basketball. Scheduled tip-off time? 6:00 a.m.
Why would two schools compete at such an hour that can fairly be described as alien to most of the kids who comprise the roster of each school? It is - as it always is - all about the Benjamins. Monmouth and St. Peter's are part of ESPN's 24-hour college basketball marathon. Being the two traditional superpowers they are the birds that prey and the birds that pray have been given the ever-popular morning drive time slot. Great news if you are Stern or Imus. Less exciting if you are Hett or Shumate.
When these two played last season -at Monmouth on December 19th at a time slightly more conducive for college hoops than 6:00 a.m. - the Hawks pounded the 'Cocks 65-47 before a packed house of slightly less than 600 at Monmouth's then-gymnasium (they opened a new facility this year, which further underscores of ESPN paying them to play St. Peter's AT St. Peter's pre-dawn. Maybe in the throes of sleep deprivation the kids cannot tell the difference between the opposition's gym and their own?). Monmouth's coach -for one -has downplayed the supposed significance of the tip-off time. “We’ll load up the bus with food and fruit, get there and be ready to play.”
Juxtaposed against the collective decision-making of the Monmouth and St. Peter's hierarchies to play a game in the wee wee hours along the lunar landscape that is the early north Jersey industrial skyline, the adults in charge of the programs at Drexel and Niagara seem downright sensible. They are slated to tip-off at 8:00 a.m. There is no truth to the rumor that in the Drexel/Niagara game, winning team gets to push the losing team over the Falls in a barrel. Although that would make for some damned entertaining television. And in the end, nothing else really matters. Right?
Well, one other thing matters. But I reckon you knew that already.
-AK
This morning @ 3:00 a.m. - an hour some refer to as ungodly while others consider it an ideal time for a morning run (beauty and beholder's eyes and all of that) - the Monmouth University Hawks hopped on a bus at their campus in West Long Branch, New Jersey and migrated north. They shall travel north to Jersey City and the campus of St. Peter's College in order to play basketball. Scheduled tip-off time? 6:00 a.m.
Why would two schools compete at such an hour that can fairly be described as alien to most of the kids who comprise the roster of each school? It is - as it always is - all about the Benjamins. Monmouth and St. Peter's are part of ESPN's 24-hour college basketball marathon. Being the two traditional superpowers they are the birds that prey and the birds that pray have been given the ever-popular morning drive time slot. Great news if you are Stern or Imus. Less exciting if you are Hett or Shumate.
When these two played last season -at Monmouth on December 19th at a time slightly more conducive for college hoops than 6:00 a.m. - the Hawks pounded the 'Cocks 65-47 before a packed house of slightly less than 600 at Monmouth's then-gymnasium (they opened a new facility this year, which further underscores of ESPN paying them to play St. Peter's AT St. Peter's pre-dawn. Maybe in the throes of sleep deprivation the kids cannot tell the difference between the opposition's gym and their own?). Monmouth's coach -for one -has downplayed the supposed significance of the tip-off time. “We’ll load up the bus with food and fruit, get there and be ready to play.”
Juxtaposed against the collective decision-making of the Monmouth and St. Peter's hierarchies to play a game in the wee wee hours along the lunar landscape that is the early north Jersey industrial skyline, the adults in charge of the programs at Drexel and Niagara seem downright sensible. They are slated to tip-off at 8:00 a.m. There is no truth to the rumor that in the Drexel/Niagara game, winning team gets to push the losing team over the Falls in a barrel. Although that would make for some damned entertaining television. And in the end, nothing else really matters. Right?
Well, one other thing matters. But I reckon you knew that already.
-AK
Monday, November 16, 2009
Once there was a Spaceship on the Roof
Watching a repeat of Bryant Gumbel's "Real Sports" program on HBO on Saturday, Gumbel was doing his end-of-program monologue - speaking about the return of the Yankees to the World Series and how that was a good thing - when he paused to refer to an observation Hall-of-Famer Bill Russell made a lifetime ago. Russell pointed out that the opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy.
I am one of six siblings. Ours is likely not an atypical family in that over time my relationship with at least one of my siblings has been less than ideal. In fact, in at least one or more instance the relationship has been non-existent. Margaret and I have been married sixteen and one-half years and have been together for eighteen plus. During that time, I have an older brother who lives roughly fifteen minutes from us - and has lived that close the entire time that we have been together - who neither my wife nor our children have ever met. And, candidly, I am at a loss to envision the circumstances under which they will.
All six of us have children. And - as I have come to realize over the course of the past several months - most of the "nextgen" are no longer kids. More than a couple of them are parents themselves, which means that I am more than simply an uncle, I am a "great" uncle. The irony of me - who has barely achieved mediocrity as an uncle - attaining the dizzying heights of greatness is not lost on me. Trust me. It is not.
The oldest of the nextgen is thirty-four years old today. It is remarkable to me that one who once was so young is now a young woman of thirty-four. Through the artifice of "social networking" I have reestablished a line of contact with her - and with some of her fellow members of the nextgen. I would not go far or be so bold as to presume it constitutes the resumption of a relationship. She was - as were those with whom I lost contact a lifetime ago and a generation removed from where we are now - a child when I last knew her.
The road back from apathy is a hard one. And I for one do not pretend to have any idea where it leads. I hope though - for today - it leads to a happy birthday.
-AK
I am one of six siblings. Ours is likely not an atypical family in that over time my relationship with at least one of my siblings has been less than ideal. In fact, in at least one or more instance the relationship has been non-existent. Margaret and I have been married sixteen and one-half years and have been together for eighteen plus. During that time, I have an older brother who lives roughly fifteen minutes from us - and has lived that close the entire time that we have been together - who neither my wife nor our children have ever met. And, candidly, I am at a loss to envision the circumstances under which they will.
All six of us have children. And - as I have come to realize over the course of the past several months - most of the "nextgen" are no longer kids. More than a couple of them are parents themselves, which means that I am more than simply an uncle, I am a "great" uncle. The irony of me - who has barely achieved mediocrity as an uncle - attaining the dizzying heights of greatness is not lost on me. Trust me. It is not.
The oldest of the nextgen is thirty-four years old today. It is remarkable to me that one who once was so young is now a young woman of thirty-four. Through the artifice of "social networking" I have reestablished a line of contact with her - and with some of her fellow members of the nextgen. I would not go far or be so bold as to presume it constitutes the resumption of a relationship. She was - as were those with whom I lost contact a lifetime ago and a generation removed from where we are now - a child when I last knew her.
The road back from apathy is a hard one. And I for one do not pretend to have any idea where it leads. I hope though - for today - it leads to a happy birthday.
-AK
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Big Cat Self-Preservation Society
Lawyers are an interesting breed. We are - to an extent - viewed analogously if not similarly to another group of human beings: members of Congress. The average man on the street does not like Congress and does not think that Congress does an effective job. Yet, that same man returns his congressional representative to Washington at a rate of re-election that is north of 90%. Pretty damn good for those we purportedly love to hate.
Similarly, lawyers have historically been viewed as something less than some kind of wonderful. You know that you belong to an unpopular profession when The Eagles can express musically the same sentiment that Shakespeare expressed dramatically centuries earlier and milk it for a hit. And I could make a case for a lot of the criticism being unfair. Or I could do what I do, which is tell myself (rightly or wrongly) that the criticism is not directed at me individually.
You choose your delusion on your own terms but before you criticize my embrace of the latter consider just how difficult it is becoming to do so with the former. New Jersey is the home to (at last count) more than 80,000 attorneys and - I can tell you from my professional experience defending individuals and entities who get sued in civil actions - a representative percentage of that number is comprised of men and women who represent plaintiffs (those doing the suing) in those actions. Also, I can tell you that in my experience attorneys bring a varying degree of expertise and skill to all that we do so some of the adversaries with whom I deal on a day in/day out basis are more skilled than others. I presume without hesitation that my adversaries would say the same thing - both about me and about my brethren in the defense bar.
New Jersey is home to a number of very, very successful law firms that specialize in the business of representing plaintiffs in personal injury matters. If you were to subscribe to the New Jersey Law Journal (and why you would as a non-lawyer when there is zero sports coverage and no comics is a mystery to me) you would see their weekly honor roll - the "Suits and Deals" column - and perhaps begin your quest for a flight of stairs down which you might hurl yourself in order to avail yourself of their services.
Lately, one of the state's more well-known plaintiffs' law firms has been engaged in a rather public Pier Six brawl with one of its former attorneys. Judging by the level of their animosity (as expressed publicly), one could forgive Juliet for her youthful naivete. The vanquished former employee has started a web site that brutally mocks his former firm. The former firm has responded by suing him in Federal court, alleging a whole boatload of violations of Federal law, including trademark infringement and cybersquatting (I would be lying full-throat if I said I have any idea what the latter is).
Who wins? Who cares. From the sidelines it is an experience akin to deciding whether to root for in Alien vs Predator. The cynic in me suspects that the former employee's M.O. is far more deeply rooted in self-promotion than altruism - regardless of his proclamations to the contrary - and that the Firm's reaction is far more deeply rooted in being really, really pissed off than it is in a concern that potential clients might mistake his web site for theirs.
My hope as an attorney is that at some point - in the not-too-distant future - the venom that is fueling this tete-a-tete both ways evaporates or simply gets channeled into something more useful. There is an endless supply of opportunities out there for lawyers (the collective) to be viewed by the world at large as unscrupulous and unsavory characters. We need not - in my opinion - create such an opportunity ourselves.
Or maybe we should just all admit it. Admit that Al Czervik was right. And a note to my fellow members of the bar: On your way to the office tomorrow morning, remember to pick up some Lysol and a sponge. It has truly hit the fan.
-AK
Similarly, lawyers have historically been viewed as something less than some kind of wonderful. You know that you belong to an unpopular profession when The Eagles can express musically the same sentiment that Shakespeare expressed dramatically centuries earlier and milk it for a hit. And I could make a case for a lot of the criticism being unfair. Or I could do what I do, which is tell myself (rightly or wrongly) that the criticism is not directed at me individually.
You choose your delusion on your own terms but before you criticize my embrace of the latter consider just how difficult it is becoming to do so with the former. New Jersey is the home to (at last count) more than 80,000 attorneys and - I can tell you from my professional experience defending individuals and entities who get sued in civil actions - a representative percentage of that number is comprised of men and women who represent plaintiffs (those doing the suing) in those actions. Also, I can tell you that in my experience attorneys bring a varying degree of expertise and skill to all that we do so some of the adversaries with whom I deal on a day in/day out basis are more skilled than others. I presume without hesitation that my adversaries would say the same thing - both about me and about my brethren in the defense bar.
New Jersey is home to a number of very, very successful law firms that specialize in the business of representing plaintiffs in personal injury matters. If you were to subscribe to the New Jersey Law Journal (and why you would as a non-lawyer when there is zero sports coverage and no comics is a mystery to me) you would see their weekly honor roll - the "Suits and Deals" column - and perhaps begin your quest for a flight of stairs down which you might hurl yourself in order to avail yourself of their services.
Lately, one of the state's more well-known plaintiffs' law firms has been engaged in a rather public Pier Six brawl with one of its former attorneys. Judging by the level of their animosity (as expressed publicly), one could forgive Juliet for her youthful naivete. The vanquished former employee has started a web site that brutally mocks his former firm. The former firm has responded by suing him in Federal court, alleging a whole boatload of violations of Federal law, including trademark infringement and cybersquatting (I would be lying full-throat if I said I have any idea what the latter is).
Who wins? Who cares. From the sidelines it is an experience akin to deciding whether to root for in Alien vs Predator. The cynic in me suspects that the former employee's M.O. is far more deeply rooted in self-promotion than altruism - regardless of his proclamations to the contrary - and that the Firm's reaction is far more deeply rooted in being really, really pissed off than it is in a concern that potential clients might mistake his web site for theirs.
My hope as an attorney is that at some point - in the not-too-distant future - the venom that is fueling this tete-a-tete both ways evaporates or simply gets channeled into something more useful. There is an endless supply of opportunities out there for lawyers (the collective) to be viewed by the world at large as unscrupulous and unsavory characters. We need not - in my opinion - create such an opportunity ourselves.
Or maybe we should just all admit it. Admit that Al Czervik was right. And a note to my fellow members of the bar: On your way to the office tomorrow morning, remember to pick up some Lysol and a sponge. It has truly hit the fan.
-AK
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