On Why I Love (And Will Subsequently Miss) North Idaho

If there’s anything I’ve been trying to preach on here recently, it’s having the ability to roll with the punches. You have to do what you have to do. The good thing, at least, is that Raquel and I both have a ton of friends in the Phoenix area, so it will allow us to have a broader support system than we had when we moved to Liberty Lake three years ago. If we can make it through that, we can make it through anything.

What puts me in a melancholy mood, however, is how attached I’ve become to the Idaho panhandle. Idaho is one of those irrelevant states (i.e. those of you who read this and say “Idaho panhandle? What the hell?” You know who you are.) One of my favorite ways to pass time is to watch Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel because of all the serene, peaceful, and down right amazing things that exist in the world. I think that the point of our lives here on this planet is to get out and see as many of God’s creations as possible. This weekend – I was able to do so.

A couple weeks ago, II spent the weekend at a friend’s house up in Sandpoint, ID on Lake Pend Oreille and, frankly, it was hard to come back to Coeur d’Alene. Actually, it was hard to come back to the real world. Not necessarily Coeur d’Alene. I love this little town. But everything on that lake is just brilliant. When we woke up, we drank a cup of coffee in a sun room that looked out over the northern arm of the lake and the surrounding mountains.

That picture was taken with a cell phone, but you get the point. How great of a life would it be if you woke up every morning, sauntered sleepily out onto the deck, and, once you rubbed the sleep out of your eyes, you were greeted with this scene? 

On Google AdSense

So, recently I was reading some articles in regards to Google AdSense and figured...what the hell? I might as well give it a try. But, as you get deeper and deeper into the AdSense world and start learning about writing for SEO, it seems (as cliche as it is) that you can quickly move away from whatever the main topic of your blog may be and create a shell of a website designed to maximize the amount of clicks on a certain advertisement.

This morning, I was doing some research on how to optimize the money you might receive on Google AdSense and, to me, it did not necessarily seem worth it. The advice basically said to create a blog/site geared towards people who are not "internet savvy". Through this, you can make your articles sound like you know what you are talking about so that the naive (and, I'm assuming, elderly) people surfing the web can stumble across your website on a Google Search. Once your "Google Page Rank" is high enough, your website will actually show up on Google searches of a certain topic, thus increasing your revenue.

(By the way, this is insanely off topic, but why were there three Jurassic Park movies made? I'm watching third one now...awful.)

I feel like there has to be an acceptable medium between the two extremes -- namely, creating a site that is designed only to maximize clicks on ads or creating a site that expresses the ideas and emotions that you want. The latter obviously is not in the top of 5 of maximizing revenue, but I feel like you can do both by creating a site that people want to read. Yes, you have to leave your link all over the place on other blogs and be an active member in the online society to grow your readership, but the success that I have (or don't have, realisitically) with Google AdSense will strictly be derived from whether or not I create a product that someone wants to read.

My readership is small or non-existent at the moment, which is something I'm working on. However, I would love some comments from people who have used Google AdSense in the past with a similar tactic as the one I lined out above. Have you had success with it? What did you find helped you the most? Overall, was the "product" you were creating (blog, site, etc.) something that you were ultimately proud of as an author/creator?

Have a good day!

On Stress

My last post was January 25th – I’m already neglecting my duties as a responsible blogger. But I have an excuse! Really!

Ok, I really don’t have a good one – saying that one is too “under stress” to do anything is probably the worse cop out in the history of cop outs. Shouldn’t stress be something that we can easily deflect? I mean, think about it. We have so much stuff surrounding us in our daily life that we should be able to take our minds off what is bothering us (for instance, substance abuse).

Yet, every night when I get off of work, I find myself too mentally fried to do anything at all. I basically become a permanent fixture on my couch and flip on my beautiful television. I’ve gained weight. I’ve lost a ton of sleep. I’ve drank a little more than I probably should be. But I sure have watched a shit load of college basketball. I already have my bracket filled out and, dammit, I’m going to win.

Here’s hoping that, for better or worse, the cause of my stress will come to an end next week so that I can start worrying about something else. Is it all really just an endless cycle of worries? Maybe I should start working out. Endorphins, and the like.

When worried, I can never make a solid decision on anything.

On Dart League

So last fall, Raquel and I joined a local dart league at Willie’s – our favorite little haunt in CDA. It was kind of a nerve racking decision because we were going to devote 10 straight Sundays to playing 17 games of darts with some of Idaho’s finest. And I mean no disrespect by that – you just know who you are. We had always played darts recreationally while we were in Missouri, but we had never really thought of going pro until one of our coworkers approached Raquel about the idea.

The first day of dart league last fall was at a bar called Paddy’s and it was kind of a nerve wracking situation – just think bad blind date in a bar with NASCAR murals on the wall. I met my two partners – Rick and Vick – and, with a cursory glance to the others in the group, I honestly thought that this was a bad decision. I felt like we had nothing in common – the age gap was roughly 15 or so years between us all, a lot of them were married, had kids, had real world problems. Above all else, they were fucking great dart players.  So not only did I feel like I was going to be dead weight on my team, I had this nauseating fear that I was going to follow up my atrocious play by being the “silent-silent” partner that sits in the corner. (As an aside, for those of you who may not know me, when I get in uncomfortable group situations, I tend to clam up and migrate to the fringes of the group.)

As it turns out, when you get a group of people together who like to drink, you tend to find a lot of things in common with each other very quickly. That first night of darts went very well – I think I played well, but, regardless, I made friends with those around me.

This brings me to the point of all this – I think it’s a rare thing in today’s society for people to open themselves up to different groups of people. It may sound a little trite, but we have found ourselves in an age where we truly are defined by the things we own and our outward appearance. Everything we come in contact with is judged within a first, momentary glance. Just think – in the era of DVR and TiVO, we no longer have to sit through commercials or boring parts of television shows or the news in general. We can skip and jump to the bits and pieces of information that we want, right now. So when we see something in the real world that we dislike or does not fit our normal perception, we “fast forward” to the next thing – which, I’m not going to lie, I did when I first met a lot of the people in the dart league.

But, lo and behold, I look forward to Sunday night more than any other night of the week not only for the sheer enjoyment of playing darts, but to see everybody. I feel like dart league is a make-shift therapy group where you have a group of real world, middle to lower middle class, blue collar folk gathering to throw darts, drink some beer, talk a little shit to each other, and just forget about the normal everyday grind. You never know where you’ll find a group of people that helps you escape – so don’t just fast forward to the next thing each time you run into something uncomfortable (cheese ball moral, yes – but it’s true and understated).

Corporate America is now all of America

Granted, I don’t watch enough news television as it stands, so I’m not sure just how much coverage the recent Supreme Court ruling has received. However, the fact that it’s not absolutely everywhere makes me believe that people are not taking it as seriously as they should. For those of you reading this who may not know what happened, the Supreme Court over turned the previous ruling that corporations could not back or fund candidates for the presidency. Now the most powerful candidate is going to be the one who can campaign to the most powerful companies in the nation – as opposed to campaigning to the people they are supposed to represent. It’s going to become, Wal-Mart presents the President of the United States of America!

I think what’s far scarier is the influence that foreign corporations have in our marketplace and how their agendas can be furthered through backing a specific candidate. Does this mean that companies can come together and front their own candidate? Is that really out of the realm of possibility? We saw in the Obama election that fundraising really help put him over the top against McCain. It allowed Obama to do things that McCain could not. With this in mind, you would think that if one company (say, Microsoft – not inflammatory, just example) wanted to put a candidate on the ticket – doesn’t said corporation’s deep pockets give their candidate an unfair advantage over traditional candidates?

I’m going to keep this short because I think that this can be extrapolated all the way to the apocalypse if we wanted to (and I’m sure several news outlets probably are). But, I’m going to stop off with two links. One is to a well written article on AlterNet.org and the second is a song that speaks very well to the situation.

When it comes to homework for the readers, I challenge someone to come up with a positive spin on this ruling. I’m grasping at straws trying to find them – and am completely open to any other opinions.

The Point Between Where I Was and Where I May Be

You don't look at the things you have. You only look at the stuff you don't have. Those guys are right about you, you're money.

- Rob (Ron Livingston) to Mike (Jon Favreau) in the movie "Swingers"

You know, there really should be a class that you take right before graduation that will give you a little preview of what life outside of academia consists of. Just like I don't believe that high school prepares you for college, I don't think college prepares you for the real world. Sure, it may prepare you for a job in the real world. But there's no direction at all when it comes to life outside of establishment.

Having 22 years (or so) of your life mapped out really can give you a false sense of security in the world. Just because you excelled in high school doesn't necessarily mean you'll excel in college and the same goes for college out into the real world. Just because you got a 4.0 in all of your business classes does not mean that you will be the best businessman when you enter the work force. But you're never told these things in college because it would discourage, I think, a great amount of people from going. Yes, the degree means a lot when it comes to getting a job outside of college -- but straight book learning really does not build much of a foundation for you to stand on, in my opinion.

For instance, I studied Literature and Creative Writing in my undergrad work. When I was sitting in my capstone class, the university's English counselor walked in and gave a presentation about "what to do with our English degrees". He handed us these little pamphlets that looked like he printed them off 5 minutes before coming to speak before our class and, with a straight face, told us that the only future we had was either Teach for America or the Peace Corps. I told him that I wanted to get an MFA and work on my writing further, but he stared right at me and told me that was a bad idea because no business people will be at my graduation waiting to hire me. "It doesn't work like that, in the real world," he said to me.

So you throw your cap in the air, hear Pomp and Circumstance while you march across the stage and shake some nameless faculty member's hand. You hug your friends and stand in the glaring sun outside of the arena and realize, "I made it. I did it." All through your childhood, it was drilled into your brain that you need to do well in school, go to college, and graduate. From there on out, life is easy because you have a degree. The whole world opens up for you. The sky is the limit.

Well, as most graduates find out within a first couple of weeks after the ceremony, that's a bunch of bull shit. When you enter the workforce as an entry level employee, you often find that there are several people -- colleagues, so to speak -- that are minus a college education. Or in the process of getting an online education. But don't worry about the fact that they're making more than you because they have more experience since they didn't take the time out of their lives to go to college.

Here's the moral of the story and what I'm really trying to hone in on: you have to be able to connect with the present state of your life. There is that cliche saying out there that the past is history, the future is unknown, so there's nothing to do but focus on the present. I think this may be one of the most overlooked and undervalued bits of advice given to young people. I should know, I never paid attention to it.

A lot is made these days about the value of money and what it can get you in life. Especially with the recession, student loans, credit cards, car payments, etc., it seems as if money is constantly the 400 pound gorilla standing in the middle of the room.

So thus, we are in the conundrum that we have transitioned from a life where all we had to do was study for tests, write papers, and make sure we went to class. Our free time was ours -- we could go running, go drinking, hang out with our friends. Our days were truly our days. But now, working all day in a cubicle staring at a computer screen can be such a drain that, when we get home, we no longer have the energy or wherewithal to go do anything. Can't go out drinking or stay up late because we have to be up at 5 A.M. every morning. Weather is just now finally getting nice, so we can go outside. But the fact of the matter is that we need to start realizing that this desire to go back to the old days and the yearn to be far enough along career-wise immediately in order to get out from under said 400 pound gorilla makes us lose the ability to focus on anything good happening in the present.

We'll take my current situation. I have a wonderful girl friend, I love my apartment, I love my dog, I love my books..I have all this stuff in my life right now that I can say that I love, so it makes me wonder why there are still those afternoons where I feel like I'm floating in nothing. The quote way back in the beginning of this post is dead on. We have a tendency to only see the things that we don't have because we take what we do have for granted. What we have is around us all the time -- thus, we inherently lose the abiliy to appreciate it the way we did when it first entered our lives. We may not have things other people have but it is not our judgment call to say that we should have those things as opposed to that person. To make statements like "Well, I deserve that more than she does". These sorts of attitudes turn our eyes away from what is good in our lives and become envious of what others have in theirs.

Please, please, please try to take a second everyday to just look out of the window, focus on the horizon, and take account of all the things in your life that you love. Not only does it make the day to day easier to bear, but it can also put things in perspective as to what your future goals are. Your goals should be your own -- not the goals of anyone else. You should strive to get where you want to be, not where other folks think you should be.

The Fall of David Ortiz

It's hard to imagine that David Ortiz no longer makes the knees of opposing pitchers knock together when he saunters up to the plate with runners on base. Watching the Mets/Red Sox game this weekend showed the pitchers are starting to buy into the hype that Ortiz has completed his fall from grace. They were not scared of Big Papi, which means that pitchers across the league are going to start gaining confidence. This is especially big for the young pitchers that Ortiz used to feed upon in pressure situations.

For the sake of conversation, let's take a look at Saturday's game against the Mets. The Red Sox dropped 16 hits and 12 runs on the Mets pitching staff. Everyone in the Red Sox starting lineup had a hit -- except Papi. Seven of them had 1 or more RBIs -- not Papi. In a day where the Red Sox let loose the fury against the Mets, Ortiz went 0 for 5. He struck out twice and left two runners in scoring position with two outs. Even though the 6 through 9 spot hitters went 12 for 20 with 7 RBIs against Mets pitching, at least they could be rest assured that there was a sure out sitting in the three spot.

Granted, now, the Red Sox are still a formidable team as yesterday's game moved them into sole position of first place in East. But, do they have the ability to survive an entire season and have any life in the post season? (This question actually goes for any of the teams in the East). But at what point do you give up on Ortiz? When does Francona sit David down and give him the "I think we need to change things up" speech? If I was him, I would do it now. He needs to either move down in the line up, or exit it completely. The last two seasons have shown some pretty marked reductions in power numbers and, if his form holds true, this season is definitely not going to be any better.

The Red Sox are an aging team and they don't have a great amount of talent in their farm system. I think, if I was Theo Epstein, if Papi has some sort of torrid turn around before the All-Star Break, I would trade him. If Papi survives the media and fan criticism of this year and finishes with his worst season to date and follows it up with another subpar season in 2010, there's no way he'll be a Red Sox any longer. Papi has one more year in the $12.5 million contract extension he signed in 2006, but I think that's the last full season we'll see Papi in Boston -- possibly, in the majors. If he has a bit of a turn around before the All-Star break hits, I might try and dangle him out there and see if any teams looking for a "power" (I use the term lightly here) bat to get them over the hump will bite.

It's a sad realization about the state of the game today when you peruse various comment boards on popular sports websites and see that many people are associating this decline with performance enhancing drugs. No one knows if this is the case or not, at this point can be nothing more than speculation from anyone. But the damage is done as soon as the first person asks, "Oh, well there steroids have worn off -- what else did you expect?" Once revered power hitters in the Majors will start to have this question thrust upon them more and more as they make their inevitable fall from grace. If any kids out there in school are studying McCarthyism need a modern day parallel, just look at the steroid rage in baseball. All someone has to do is throw the "s" word at somebody, at it can be enough to ruin their reputation. Or at least push it so close to ruin, that the athlete will be forced to make an impassioned speech about their non-use of PEDs, or the "mis-remembering" of their teammates (*ahem* Roger). Then, even once they've made their speech outlining their innocence, the television personalities and bloggers everywhere still question if the accused was genuine or not.

For Papi's sake, I hope it's just age and not anything steroid related. Even though I am a die hard Yankees fan, I'm a fan of the entire sport first. Papi was an extraordinary specimen of power and I, for one, will miss watching the pitcher's entire demeanor when stepped into the batters box.