A journalist approached me last week and asked, “What is it you love about yourself?” I was taken a bit by surprise, as she pushed a microphone towards me for my response. “I don’t love anything about myself…” I stammered.  Immediately I felt as if I had answered wrong. “Does anyone else say they love something about themselves…?” “Well, the last lady we talked to said she loved her smile.” As usual, I regretted talking to the press. Some journalist would ask me a question – on the record – and I would make a statement. Then they would use a small part of my statement in the eventual news…

I have not posted about the war in Ukraine since around the time it started, but it has been in my thoughts. I think back about the prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine over a year ago, and the predominant feeling now is sadness – the vast loss of life since Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Now it is one year later. What do I feel on the one year anniversary of the start of the war? I feel sadness. This conflict begins to approach 20th century scorched-earth military campaigns with vast loss of life on all sides. The civilian casualties, and likely war crimes, from…

One of my mantras is the following: ‘“It is a good year when you don’t have to see either a doctor or a lawyer.” Yesterday I dealt with both lawyers and doctors. Why did I break my rule? And in the same day? Let me explain. Firstly, I served my day of jury duty. I had been called up to perform my “civic responsibility” in the justice system last fall, but as I was coaching high school tennis in the afternoon I postponed it as far into the future as possible. That meant I had to go to court yesterday, Valentine’s Day. The court would give me no further extensions.…

Recently I was showing a video of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941 – with Japanese CGI dive bombers zooming down on unsuspecting American battleships, and actors recreating the panicked scene with bombs exploding around them – as my audience watched the violent action unfold. Then I stopped the video and said the following: “This obviously is the shocking start of WWII for an unprepared and surprised United States, and the road to victory would be long and arduous. Some commentators would later claim that these men and women who endured the Great Depression and then fought and won WWII were the ‘greatest generation’ of Americans ever.…

Who am I? Such a simple question, so difficult to answer. What do I like to do? How do I want to live? What am I good at? What am I not good at? What does my mind and heart tell me? What do proven results in life tell me? What is my role in the world? Where do I fit? Where don’t I? One would think the older I get, the better I could answer all these questions. And I have gotten better. But then as I age the answers to these questions might change. In fact, they do change. But how exactly? And when? I have heard experts…

Happy New Year everyone! Last month I wrote about the holidays and said the following about New Year’s Eve celebrations: “I never enjoyed a hard-partying New Year’s Eve staying out late, or the hangover the next morning. But I have enjoyed the past twenty or so New Year’s Eves when I quietly stay at home, think over the past year, and then plan for the future. I write down my resolutions for the new year, go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and wake up refreshed and ready to go the next morning. Hence January 1 is always a good day for me. A new start, a fresh beginning –…

Remember this. You have been wont to use your mind to command your body to perform. As if your body were separate from your mind, and not part and parcel of it. Your mind in the driver’s seat has its advantages: you get a lot out of what God has given you in terms of athletic achievement, and that is no small thing. Your body needs exercise – craves it, in fact – and you give it what it wants. And then some. But, but, but… You don’t always listen to what your body has to say. Your body constantly is speaking to you, but you don’t always listen. This…

Why? I have no problem with the holidays themselves – Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s Eve – especially Thanksgiving – I am a fan of that holiday dedicated to appreciating what you have, which everyone can and should celebrate. But Christmas has become so hyped and commercialized that I endure rather than celebrate it. And New Year’s Eve was always overrated as an opportunity to party with friends. I never enjoyed a hard-partying New Year’s Eve staying out late, or the hangover the next morning. But I have enjoyed the past twenty or so New Year’s Eves when I quietly stay at home, think over the past year, and then…

I talk about abortion with my high school students, or about the losses on Civil War battlefields, or the movie Wit about John Donne’s poetry and the process of getting sick and dying.  I watch my students very closely for their reactions to human tragedy: the dying of a sick toddler, the casualty of a father/husband on the battlefield, a cancer patient wasted away to next to nothing – – do you see what I mean? Year after year I watch the faces of my students as they witness all this in my humanities classes, and I scrutinize their emotional reactions. What are they thinking? Can I tell how they…

So yesterday at midnight EST, and 9:00 pm PST, the end of year USTA rankings for 2022 were released online. I had been waiting painfully for this moment of judgment, as I wrote about six weeks ago. The event one year ago when I got bumped up to 5.0 was still on my mind. All year long I worried about the USTA re-ranking on December 1st. They finally arrived. The crucial question: Would I remain a 4.5? Or be moved up to a 5.0? Would I be able to remain at my present level and continue to compete in local USTA 4.5 leagues and enjoy the company of my friends…

Posts on my webpage go up and down in popularity with Google, for God only knows what reason; I can see all the statistics in the Word Press app or Google Webmaster Console. I don’t care enough about getting attention for my posts to do a deep dive into Search Engine Optimization in the Google Search Engine. But I wonder at how the gods at Google point people towards one of my URLs, and then another. It is all a great mystery. Some posts are popular, and then fade. Others become popular, and then aren’t. It is all about ever-changing search engine algorithms. Who knows? But the other day one…

At the moment I am watching everyone talk about how the social media network Twitter, bought recently by billionaire Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars, is supposedly going under. Long unprofitable, Twitter with its new owner is firing employees and urging those who remain to work harder – and many Twitter employees are quitting, too. Last night they claimed to have locked all the doors to the main Twitter building and entrance was highly restricted. The company seems to be in crisis. Twitter has long since had an outsized influence on American elite culture. It does not have that many members compared to Snapchat or TikTok or Facebook/Instagram or Google/YouTube…

Jeez, you would think it, yes? After long years of COVID restrictions and a “Green New Deal” – along with the massive government spending, runaway inflation, and a deteriorating economy – and stupid Native American “land acknowledgments” and permissive criminal justice “reform” in big cities with mushrooming murder rates and LGBTQIA2S+ mania and college loan forgiveness, and whatever other excesses propagated by the Democratic Party and Biden Administration – whose frontispiece promised to govern as a moderate, but instead has placated the progressive wing of his party… you would think that voters would be ready to vote the other way – for the Republican Party. As for me, I am…

Friday was Veterans Day. I had the day off so I drove 90 miles down to Orange County to see family and friends. Totally overwhelmed recently while coaching my daughters tennis team and teaching six classes, I had not been there since we returned from the Caribbean in mid-August. A visit was long overdue. So I dropped her off with her cousin at my sister’s house, and I was pretty sure the two 15-year old girls would talk for the next 24 hours straight, excepting a few hours of sleep. Then I went to go visit and walk with my dad, dine with dad and brother, sleep at my brother’s…

It is almost like a mantra for me: going off to college is where you can take your first baby steps as an adult – you can move out of your parent’s house and move into a university dorm, you can take harder “more adult” college classes, you can fall-in-love and fall-out-of love – meet new people who broaden your understanding, discover new cities away from where you grew up, see experimental French movies at the student union on Friday night, and come to understand better the wider world beyond your childhood. It is an exciting time of life, when it all seems to lie ahead of a person just…

At my brother’s urging, I have been watching the Netflix series Narcos. In my usual way, it has taken me some seven months to get through eight episodes. Why so slow? I am busy. My wife and daughters tend to monopolize the TV. I am too impatient to sit through extended video. Whatever. But I arrived at a remarkable scene at the end of episode 5 “There Will Be a Future” where Colonel Horacio Carrillo of the Columbian military police and infamous drug trafficker Pablo Escobar have a remarkable phone conversation. Check that scene out for yourself here – – as a representative of the Colombian state Col. Horacio Carrillo…

The midterm elections are only one week away. My dad claimed these would be the “most important elections in his lifetime,” and he said he would be up late watching the returns on TV. My father was heavily invested emotionally in the outcome of the vote – he very much desired that his party would win. He was not alone. For my part, I thought this was not even a presidential election, but an off-year election. Why was this election so important? I care maybe ⅓ as much as my father, but still I have some thoughts. Is this election ultra-critical in American history? I suspect it is just another…

In approximately seven weeks the United States Tennis Association will update its NTRP ratings for the next year. Much to my shock and chagrin, I was re-ranked at the 5.0 level last year on December 3, 2021. I managed to win my appeal eventually to move back to the 4.5 level, but I am a 4.5 A ranking – “A” for on appeal. I am sort of on probation. So if I had a good season competitively in USTA Flex Leagues during 2022, I could be moved up again.  I will know if that is the case in early December. The Sword of Damocles hovers above me, and I am…

I just finished the book Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults Are Missing) by Emily Weinstein and Carrie James. I read with interest at the end of chapter 6 where four teenagers, self-described as “liberal,” came together for a discussion about whether or not they should discuss politics with those who disagreed with them.  Two of them said there is much to be learned by engaging with those who see things differently, and the other two claimed exactly the opposite. The latter claimed you could never engage with such an “enemy” who would “deny your right to exist” and whose ideas “made me feel unsafe” and “hurt…

It is that time of the year, and one way or another I always feel the approach of these dates: October 6th, yesterday, the 2nd anniversary of the death of my stepmother; and October 31st, the day my mother died almost 26 years ago. Fateful anniversaries they are, and I feel them. It does not matter that my mother died so long ago, or that the memories recede and fade with the years. I still remember . And it does not matter that my stepmom was already over 80 years of age and had long struggled with a fatal disease – metastatic breast cancer – although that does color the…

To be a teacher is to live the binge all-or-nothing lifestyle of the student forever. Your calendar is the academic one. You either have final exams and are overwhelmed. Or you have the summer off with little or nothing to do. And I have been doing this for 28 years. Most do the academic lifestyle as college students and then move on. I have stayed my entire adult life. There are pros and cons to this lifestyle, and I have long since accepted the tradeoffs. No regrets. But now I am in the middle of the overwhelmed portion of the year. I teach all day long which is exhausting, and…

I received the following communication from YouTube last Saturday night at 11:36 pm: I read this statement with unease. Here is the megacompany YouTube – worth approximately 86 billion dollars and with some two billion users, and owned by an even larger Google company – and they are worried about my “mental health” – someone expressed (a person, a bot, whatever) a concern that something I posted leads them to believe I might harm myself. How strange. The posting in question was an introductory lecture about the history of suicide that I uploaded to YouTube some 11 years ago, as part of an introduction to a unit on euthanasia I…

I am sailing the ship of state through a sea of estrogen. Or I feel at times like I am swimming in an ocean of estrogen, and I struggle to keep my head above the surface. Between work and home I am up to my ears in females – teenage girls, in particular.  And this sea I swim in is not always a placid and predictable one. There are sudden emotional storms which produce powerful waves of frustration and angst. I often find myself buffeted by these waves. They wash over me. Sometimes they take me completely by surprise. One moment all is calm. Then the opposite. In short, “estrogen…

I saw that Barbara Ehrenreich died three weeks ago. I was saddened. I enjoyed Ehrenreich as an author, although I disagreed with her on just about everything. I especially enjoyed her “Nickel and Dimed” piece of muckraking investigative journalism, and read the first chapter with my economics students each year. I saw that not long before her death, Barbara had published a book which had flown under the radar and I knew nothing of – a “spiritual autobiography,” or something akin. The book was called “Living with a Wild God.” I immediately bought and listened to the audiobook version, read by Barbara herself. It was wonderful to hear her talk…

I read of the death of the author Norah Vincent last week. It was unusual in that she actually died in early July of this year, but the news of her passing was released only a few weeks ago. I enjoyed Norah’s work earlier in this century. She was a lesbian tending towards the libertarian with unconventional and interesting views, and as such I read her work with interest and pleasure. I appreciated the slant of Norah’s mind. I remember reading her best known book about passing for a male, “Self-Made Man,” listening to the audiobook on my way driving north through Santa Barbara on the 101 Freeway to an…

I work for the government, so I know what I mean when I say that the government often makes rules so stupid they should be ignored. And the majority of the Covid regulations of the past two years have been stupid in the extreme. Here in California they closed all the parks and tennis courts, and they even tried to close the beach. “Stay home, stay safe!”  I rarely stay home and I’m always out exercising: thus it has been all my adult life. So from the beginning I ignored these “stay at home” rules. Here is a telling example: In the height of the lockdowns on Easter of 2020,…

All last week I was out of contact with the larger world. No Internet, no newspapers, nada. I was on a cruise in the Caribbean and was mostly in the middle of the ocean, and I loved it! I could just relax and enjoy my vacation. The outside world would still be there when I got back. But when I arrived back in Florida and docked last Saturday morning, I connected to the Internet again and caught up on the news via my iPhone. I was hit with the usual tragedy which the newspaper brings. I read first of all that my acquaintance Carmen Ramirez has been struck and killed…

So in a few short weeks I will go back to work in my 28th year of teaching. My classroom will be full of new students ready for a new semester. And it will be my 23rd at my current school. All of them in the same classroom, no less. The same 70′ by 50′ physical space. So I sit down this morning to think about where I am, what I am doing, and how I might want to make adjustments. If I don’t take this deep inventory soon, I will be too busy to do it.  So here it goes. I apologize in advance for the unavoidable length of…

The U-Shaped Happiness Curve, touted by researchers, claims that the data is clear, across cultures and even species. The numbers show that on average life satisfaction drops during midlife and begins its recovery around age 50, reaching its peak at the end of life. Younger people tend to be happy and the eldery tend to be happy, but persons in their 30s and increasingly into their 40s tend to be miserable. To be in the middle of your life is to struggle, as Dante told us some 900 years ago. I have found the U Shaped Happiness Curve to be real in my own life. Thankfully, I am past the…