The Get Fresh Crew

I promised I would write every day.  I never promised I would post all of my writings.

I've spent the last three days working on a really neat assignment that I just handed in.  Along the way I've leaned on some pretty awesome people.  I'm lucky enough to have very good friends who were willing to double as professional contacts on extremely short notice.

Elliot Yamada, Ben Sprows, Eric Warasta, Adam Lenter, and above all Sarah Dougherty, IT'S CALLED GRATITUDE!!

I also need to shout out Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner, who are the eternal presidents of La Coalition de Frienfessionals.

When You Need Yoga

I haven't been writing about yoga as much lately.  It hasn't been a conscious decision.  Someone who shall remain nameless teased me that TWEDP had turn into a yoga-exclusive blog.  Being a contrarian, I suppose my subconscious could be driving me to write about other things as a way to prove him wrong, but I don't even think that's the case.  For one thing, other stuff has been grabbing my attention.

The bigger issue is that yoga has been relatively tough for me lately.  I've been traveling a lot.  While I'm still keeping up with the physical practice of yoga, I'm doing so at times of the day to which my body isn't accustomed.  Mostly, though, the problem is stress.  On Monday, I move out of my apartment and into the great unknown.  The stress of moving and looking for a job has made asana practice, meditation, and mindful living much more difficult.  My muscles are tight as a drum, and even the best classes at the World's Greatest Yoga Studio fail to fully loosen them up.  Stress is also allowing old insecurities to manifest themselves much more easily, which makes living joy, equanimity, compassion, and kindness much more difficult.

...and I don't know how to make an artful transition to say what I want to say next, which is that I'm incredibly proud of myself.  I recognize how thoroughly terrified I am, and I am doing my best to work with that feeling to get through that feeling.  I'm still on my mat 4-5 times a week, even if I'm having a harder time hitting poses that I generally take for granted.  I'm still sitting down to mediate (almost) every night, even if calming the mind is impossible.  I'm still reading the Sutras (almost) every night before I go to bed.  Life has thrown some fairly significant obstacles at me, but I'm still here.  I'm still present.  I'm still mindful.

All of this makes me recall the guy who showed up for his first yoga class this past Monday.  Our instructor's profound philosophy towards beginner yoga can be summed up with the ancient yogic maxim "sink or swim," so this poor kid got a full-on FSY class.  As we were walking out, he was moving so slowly he could have been limping if I didn't know better, if I didn't know that feeling where every muscle in your body is clenched up and movement seems impossible.

And yet he had the biggest smile on his face.

Word up, kid.  If you keep showing up, so will I.

Michael Bay is Not the Problem. You Are.

You know why Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were popular when we were kids?  Because megacorps figured out they were the most efficient way to get us to get our parents to purchases cheap plastic stuff, so megacorps bought up a lot of TV space after school on UHF stations to run 30 minute commercials for said plastic stuff.

Put a different way, have you gone back and WATCHED any of the cartoons you used to like as a kid?  I have.  They're terrible.  The plots, voice acting, production, and animation are all third rate, even given the technology available at the time.  They introduce new characters every episode, and most of them only show up in one or two subsequent episodes.  Their inclusion makes no sense from a narrative standpoint.  But from a product placement standpoint, it makes complete sense.

Or have you forgotten Sharkticons?

So please, please, please stop complaining that Michael Bay ruined Transformers and is going to ruin Ninja Turtles.  Whatever you and I imagine those two shows to be, they're not.  They were always naked cash grabs, so changing them to grab more cash makes complete sense.

My Name is Bryan, and I Like Kentucky

Yes, the title is supposed to invoke an AA meeting.  I feel like I've done something wrong, but...

Man.

Kentucky is so good, and so much fun to watch.  I love them.  I love Anthony Davis.  I love Kidd Gilchrist, both the player and the name that sounds like a member of the Teen Titans.  I love that, in the era of one and done, Kentucky has a McDonlads' All American that comes off the bench.  I even love Calipari a little, for putting this thing together.

Andy Staples explains my feelings really well.

The Chong Li Theory of College Basketball

Last night, Ohio State got punched in the mouth.  For the first five minutes of the second half, Cincinnati could not miss.  They took a lead in a game that Ohio State controlled for the entire first half.

In other words, Cincinnati is Ray Jackson.

You can win a title without being particularly tough, but you have to be the best the team to do so.  This is why the Shaq/Kobe Lakers could win three straight titles without being particularly resilient.  That's why Miami is still the favorite to win the NBA title this year.

(Lakers fans, calm down.  That lack of resiliency was on Shaq, not Kobe.  After he drove Shaq out of LA, Kobe proved himself to be quite resilient.)

Neither Ohio State nor North Carolina is the best team in college basketball this year.  Kentucky is.  Kentucky has the best draft prospect since Dwight Howard and NBA talent surrounding him.  To beat Kentucky, you either need to catch them on a bad night where you are also hitting shots (a la Indiana or Vandy), or you need to be very, very talented and resilient enough to survive when Kentucky hits you with a 10-2 run in two minutes, like they do to everyone.  Then, you have a chance.

North Carolina has the talent but not the heart.  Carolina fans, I'm not even trolling, so don't be mad.  You know Harrison Barnes doesn't have the eye of the tiger.  You know this team gets tight in close games.  Even with a completely healthy team, you were never beating Kentucky.

If you really want to stop Kentucky, get behind Ohio State.  They're big, physical, athletic, and smart.  Last night, they showed they could take a punch.  They are the only team left with a legitimate claim to being better than Kentucky.

All Questions are Good Questions

On Friday, I did the keynote address for the Connecticut Association of Student Councils' state conference.  It was a blast.  The energy from the kids gave me a tremendous boost in my stride.  As part of my day, the fantastic Todd Burlingham and I presented "Do the Math: Let X Equal Student Activities," the new presentation from the Alliance for Student of Activities.

In brief, "Do the Math" is a presentation that aims to promote the expansion of student activities at the middle school and high school levels.  Scholarly evidence of the highest quality and published in over 100 prestigious peer-reviewed journals show that student activities have an independent, statistically significant positive effect on almost any outcome you can choose.  You want a kid to have a better GPA, better test scores, better chance of graduating high school and college?  Put that kid in student activities, because student activities make all of those things happen and more.

The early stages of the presentation's history have been an unqualified success.  The presentation debuted in December of 2011, and there's a very good chance that 5,000 or more people will see it before the end of 2012.  Moreover, we're winning the hearts and minds of our audience faster than we thought possible.  In particular, principals seem to be paying attention.

The people behind "Do the Math" are mostly professional educators.  I am the lone social scientist in the group, so my role has been to translate these compelling results into terms that our audience of teachers, principals, school board members, superintendents, and policymakers can understand.  I have done a good enough job in this task for our presentation to be credible and professional, and I would stake my professional reputation that the information in the presentation is accurate.

However, I am not beyond being phased by a particularly good question about how statistics work.  After our presentation, a very nice teacher approached me  and asked what she thought was a really stupid question.  To make the point about independent effects in a setting with controls, our presentation asserts that the studies we cite create, through statistics, sets of identical twins, where everything about two people is exactly the same--same parents, same demographics, same level of achievement--except that one participates in student activities, and the other does not.

This teacher asked how statistics did that.

And I was stumped.

This Connecticut teacher, being all apologetic, asked a question about how multivariate statistical analysis actually worked, how it actually determined the size of the effect of each independent variable on the dependent variable, how we know that putting any tenth grader into student activities will result in an almost 6 percent gain in his/her scores on standardized math tests.  Keep in mind that I explain this stuff for a living.  I taught my department's methods courses and explained regression analysis more times than I can count.  Student evaluations and faculty review said I was really, really good at it.  And yet the right question at the right time threw me for a loop, at least for a few seconds.

The point to this long, only kinda focused blog entry: this statistics stuff is complicated.  Because I am immersed in stats pretty consistently, I can forget that the logic isn't intuitive.  It's a good experience for me to remember my limitations.

Also, I hope this story gives heart to the rest of the Alliance Ambassadors, who don't have the statistical training that I do.  Before our presentation this week, Todd said he was glad I was there, because the research findings confuse him.  Yet I saw Todd do an exceptional job explaining every statistical concept in the presentation.  One need not be able to explain every sophisticated nuance of statistics to understand and use them.  In Todd's case, and in the case of the rest of the trained ambassadors, they understand the notion of controls, longitudinal data, independent effects, and everything else well enough to explain them competently to educated audiences.  They may not be able to stand up at an academic conference and explain everything perfectly, but I am so proud and so impressed  by how much they have learned and are able to share.

Besides, if Todd and the rest of the Ambassadors could explain statistics as well as I could, I would have taught myself right out of a job.  It doesn't pay, but the fringe benefits are fantastic.

Lest the point of "Do the Math" get lost in this discussion of statistics, let me reiterate that we know, beyond all reasonable standard of doubt, that student activities make kids better.  Participants don't have better scores just because activities attract better students.  These things make kids smarter, more motivated, more compassionate, and whatever else you can think of, and we have empirical evidence that will withstand any standard of scholarly scrutiny.

BOO-NUS CONTENT: Bjork

Yo.

Yo.

Do you realize that "Pagan Poetry" is only the fifth track on Vespertine?


All the set up, all the glory, all the distance we travel to get to the most perfect track of the decade...takes place  in four songs?

I mean, "Cocoon" is about as perfect an e.e. cummings poem of a downtempo sigh  you will ever find, and yet the context that Vespertine establishes for that song makes it even greater than it is and, somehow, makes it prelude to even greater things.

Once, Bjork had a love of icy perfection that she knew could never last.  Imagine standing in a castle made of ice in an imaginary land with the perfect lover dying from the knowledge that someday he'd be left behind.

And then imagine singing about it.

BONUS CONTENT: Nick Young and the Clippers

The only problems with Nick Young is that he is completely one dimensional, he's not very good at his one dimension, and he has a complete disregard for ball safety.

Other than that, great trade, Clippers!

Good Things Are Worth the Wait

Among the five million things I have going on right now, I stumbled upon a great idea for today's blog post.  It's so good that I just wrote the first part and realized I want it to give it some time to marinate and develop.  I am excited, because this is the first time I've started a blog post that I realized might have a wider audience.

So no new blog post today, but tomorrow's will be, I think, the best written, most interesting post I've written yet.  Hopefully when you see it, you won't think today's post is as much of a copout.

Speaking of cops, since you're not reading my blog today, go check out Axe Cop.

My Last Nerve

Life (or the God of your choice, if you prefer) puts certain people in your path as growth opportunities.  Think you're nonviolent?  Think you're serene?  Life will give you people who test you.  And with everything else I have going on right now, I do not want to deal with this same...old...issue from the same person.

Deep breaths.  Meditation.  Yoga.  These are my friends.  These can overcome my impatience and my frustration.

Standard disclaimer: the person(s) to whom I am referring is not on Facebook or Twitter and is certainly not reading this blog.  It's not you.  You are wonderful.

Two Words to Fix the NCAA Tournament

"Strategic Unfairness"

Today's NCAA Tournament games have been boring.  We've seen exactly one close game (Wichita State/VCU) and one game that sounds like it was good, but I was flying to Connecticut (Syracuse/UNC Asheville).  That's a one hot album every ten year average.

The real problem with the tournament is that the selection committee has gotten too good.  Thanks entirely to the movie Moneyball, advanced statistics have made it possible for people to compare teams from different conferences very fairly.  Gone are the days when Murray State would be patted on the head for its one-loss season and given a 13 seed.  Now, teams like Wichita State regularly get 5 seeds, which leads to matchups with VCU that no one cares about.

Do you recognize the problem?  If Murray State were a 13 seed, some 4 seed was probably going down today.  We'd get a buzzer beater, we'd think that an underdog had won a huge upset, and everyone would be happy.

Solution: we need to reintroduce corruption into the selection process.  No one wants to see Wichita State play VCU, but underseed them both, and I will LOVE to watch them take down an over-seeded Baylor or Michigan team.  An additional benefit is it allows athletic directors and other NCAA types to engage in yet another form of corruption, which will make them happy.

Stress and the Future

I'm a mess with stress, though I present it with finesse.  It's a tough time.  No need to go into the details.

This stress comes from worries about the future.  However, I have no doubt that I'm going to keep eating, sleeping under a roof, and doing all the things that are critical to a healthy, full life come July 1st.  There is a zero percent chance I go hungry or homeless.

Instead, my stress comes right from my fears about my self-image.  Specifically, who am I when I'm done at Wake Forest?  How does it affect my status, how others perceive me?  I'm also worried that the next j.o. I take will keep me from doing the things that matter.

Really, the things that are causing my stress are that simple and that inconsequential.  Like, maybe Bryan doesn't need to take such a job.  Or maybe Bryan can quit such a job if he finds it is getting in the way of what matters.  He has a very good friend who did just that, and life worked out just fine for her.  As for status, whatever.  The only people who judge someone by the status of their job are jerks and...me, I guess.

And I don't think I'm a jerk.  Insert smiley face emoticon.

If you're going through a tough time, I recommend you break down what scares you.  A little honesty and introspection can show us that a lot of the fears about the future we have aren't nearly as bad as our heads make them out to be.  Everything that you really want and need is always available to you.

Ben Riggs' latest masterpiece directly influenced this post.  Make 15 minutes to read and digest it.  You'll be glad you did.

Yoga Clothes and the Landmark Forum

Wait, Lululemon encourages people to join the Landmark Forum?

Man, I try not to judge another person's path, but this is an organization that charges a hundred bucks for yoga pants made in sweatshops and actively supports the favored ideology of every a$$hole Wall Street banker.

Fck Lululemon.  Most companies that exploit spirituality at least make token gestures towards doing the right thing.  Lululemon can't even be bothered with that.

Kicking Ass to Live

I read an article over at Elephant Journal last week that talked about how asana is only one limb of yoga, although we Americans tend to treat it as the end all and be all, and how advanced practionners should move past the need to hit every pose every time.  Right on.  I've written about the very same things in this space.

However...

Over the last week, life stayed heavy, when I thought it was getting lighter.  I broke under the load a little bit.  I spent the weekend on my couch with ESPN.  I needed the break, but I woke up today knowing that I needed to get back in the game.  I needed to work out the stress that I had accumulated.  So what I needed was an ass-kicking hour and a half of yoga.  I needed to sweat the pain away.  

Asana isn't the only thing, except when it is.

The Backlash to the KONY Backlash

First, KONY should always be your favorite terrible hip-hop acronym.

I was about to write a long piece blasting those people who wanted to get all smug about the KONY video.  Once I started to read about the backlash, I slowed my roll.  I haven't watched the video and don't intend to, but the criticism sounds fair.  Invisible Children should be commended for an innovative and effective outreach campaign, but it won't do to simply swap sets of butchers.

Yet my core worries about Andrew Sullivan and the rest of Smug Brigade remains. The quote from Rebecca Rosen in the link is worth a copy-and-paste. "It would be a terrible outcome," Rosen wrote, "if those who initially pushed the video along were discouraged by this experience from further engagement, overlearning the lesson and believing there is no positive way for Americans to engage in the world abroad."  I am FB friends with a lot of high school students who shared the KONY link, because I am sure it was the first time any of them had ever thought of the scale of human rights violations in Africa.  Their outrage and desire to help is completely sincere.

If any of them are reading this, please don't let anything you hear about Invisible Children compromise that sense of outrage you had while watching the video.  The truth might be more complicated than the video portrays, but your urge to want to do something is a beautiful thing.

Packing Conflicts

At the end of the month, I am moving out of my apartment.  Like a responsible adult, I have already started packing.  Remember, nothing makes me feel better than feeling like a responsible adult.

Like most everything else in my life for the last year, packing leaves me profoundly conflicted.  I am excited about what is to come but terrified that I don't know what that is yet.  I am both excited and terrified this move represents a step towards a new job and possibly career.  I am excited and relieved because moving out represents another break from my soon-to-be previous employer but sad because living in this apartment has meant so much more than said employer, has opened up so many amazing doors, and has led to the creation of so many wonderful friendships.

I've reached the point where I'm pretty comfortable with who I am.  Few things that can happen to me could still rock my sense of self, although I know that something down the line will do just that at some point.  But as for now, starting down a move and job fears, all I can think of is that I've done all of this before, so I don't get too worked up about anything.  However my situation resolves itself or doesn't, there will be good and bad aspects to it.

So I think being conflicted is probably an indicator that I can see more of the whole the picture.  Not all of it by a long shot, but enough to know...something worth knowing, I guess.

All of these conflicted emotions, and all I'm doing, at least for now, is putting a lot of stuff in storage and moving up to Bull City.  Given the 95 percent chance that I eventually move out of the Triangle, I can't wait for, and can't stand the thought of, the conflict I'll feel then.

One thing I am not conflicted about: LSU has a real shot of knocking off Kentucky.  CHAOS ALWAYS CHAOS (c) Takao Yamada.

The Four Kingpins of the Wire

Stringer wanted to be a businessman. Prop Joe, at heart, was a hustler, not a drug dealer. Prop Joe just wanted to get over on you, and drugs just happened to be the way to do it. Avon almost had too MUCH swagger. He was like Michael Jordan without the athletic ability, so he competed elsewhere. Avon also had a critical weakness, which is that he cared about family and people too much.  Remember, if Avon wasn't so bothered by D'Angelo's murder, the tension between him and Stringer never gets that bad, they never betray each other, and they either co-opt or destroy Marlo.  Stringer has the co-option underway with that scene in the row home. 

Marlo? Man, Marlo was about nothing but killing and maintaining his rep.  Please note that I offer this observation not as a criticism of Marlo. Marlo had absolutely nothing else in his life other than the Game, which probably is why he was arguably its best player. He doesn't get too concerned with profit maximization, hustling the other guy, or family. In time, if he stayed in the Game long enough, inevitably he would have gotten sloppy or bored and slipped just enough for some other kid to jump up and take the crown.  I assume Avon and Stringer were a lot like Marlo when they were coming up.  

But that time hadn't come yet.  Marlo was nothing but pure, unadulterated hunger. He was a great follow up to Avon and Stringer because he's NOT cool and he doesn't have much game (as witnessed by how awkward he is with the ladies). All he has is the willingness to do absolutely anything to protect his sh!t. In the end, Marlo best understands the code of the streets: you have to do anything to survive, and you must throw away anything that gets in the way without a moment's hesitation, like some nightmare version of Buddhism.

Rush Limbaugh

I finally heard the clip, courtesy of The Black Guy Who Tips.  The underrated part of this whole surreal, hilarious saga:

Rush Limbaugh thinks that the amount of birth control pills a woman takes is related to the amount of sex she is having.

Now, Rush's ignorance may intentional.  He may be trying to conflate the pill with RU-486.  You don't get to be a billionaire off a talk radio show without being smart.  But I prefer the other interpretation, which is that he really thinks you need to take more birth control pills the more you have sex.

Tee hee hee.

With that in mind, caption this picture.

Rajon Rondo and the Cul-De-Sac of Doom

NBA fans know very well that some teams are trapped in the hopeless middle.  More than any other league, one needs a transcendent superstar to win an NBA title.  If your doesn't have one, the best way to get one is to  live in a city like New York, Miami, or Los Angeles that a superstar will consider when he becomes a free agent.  Otherwise, the best way to get a superstar is to be so awful that you can get a high draft pick and draft a superstar.

What that means for the contemporary NBA is as follows

1. Have a superstar, and have hope for right now: Miami (the favorites), Oklahoma City, Chicago, Orlando (if Dwight stays), the Clippers, the Lakers, Memphis (if Z-Bo comes back and is really the guy he was in last year's playoffs), and Dallas
2. Have young potential superstars on their roster, so might get there in a few years: Cleveland, Washington, and Sacramento (BIG CUZ COME UP!!)
3. Truly terrible teams with a good chance of getting the first pick in this year's draft, aka the Anthony Davis Sweepstakes: Charlotte and New Orleans
4. Completely Screwed: Everyone else

None of what I just wrote is news to NBA fans.  Today, however, I'd like to think of the plight of players on Class Four teams.  Specifically, let's talk about Rajon Rondo.

I am a known Rondo hater, because he can't shoot and he is always scowling, a habit he may have picked up from former teammate, close friend, and officially TWEDP enemy Kendrick Perkins.  However, in last night's discussion with This Substantial Nonsense, I realized how unfair the NBA media and public are to Rondo.  Rondo is not good enough to be the best player on a title team, but he is still one of the 15 best players in the league.  Besides his complete inability to make a jump shot, he does literally everything.  He is a one-man fast break who is fantastic in transition.  He defends as well as any point guard in the league.  He and Russell Westbrook are the two heirs to Jason Kidd's title of Best Rebounding Point Guard.  Most of all, he finds the open man and puts his teammates in the best possible position to score better than any point guard east of Steve Nash.

And what is Rondo's reward for his transcendent play?  He plays with one star at the very tail edge of his prime (Peezy), a star who has aged into an incredibly valuable role player (Ray Allen), and an over-the-hill bully who likes to scream at things, as long as he knows they won't scream back (man, I hate KG).  His GM is terrible, so the rest of his roster has one or two valuable pieces (peace to Brandon Bass) and a whole lot of crap.  Because everyone is old, the Celtics can't run, so Rondo can't play the way that would be most effective for him.  Worst of all, he deals with a pampered, ungrateful fan base that recognizes he's the team's best player, which entitles them to blame him because, OMG, Boston fans are so tortured, we haven't won a major sports title in NINE WHOLE MONTHS.

So, of course, now Rondo's name is in trade rumors, and because the Celtics have a horrible GM, a trade is possible.  Hell, because the Celtics aren't going anywhere, maybe the horrible GM is trying to bottom out and get a ticket in the Anthony Davis Raffle.  A trade would be the best thing that could happen to Rondo.  He'd go from a pampered fan base to a place that might actually appreciate the staggering diversity of his talents.  His new team might not be populated with fossils, so they could run more, which would make Rondo even more valuable.

In a new situation, maybe we could learn to appreciate Rondo for all the things he does and not the one conspicuous thing he does not do.  Maybe we could take a lesson from that and not blame Rondo, Andre Igoudala, Josh Smith, and every other guy with a noticeable flaw in their otherwise spectacular game just because they're not one of the five best players in the league.

Why You're Wrong about the NBA All-Star Game

There are three types of people who talk about how awful the NBA All-Star Game is.

One, there are the outright racists, although secretly, they must adore a good deal of the All-Star Weekend proceedings.  If you think I just took a veiled shot at Chris Brown and Nikki Minaj, you are incorrect, because it is veiled no longer.

Two, there are hardcore NBA fans.  For some reason, a large number of the people who love the league the most feel the need to sh!t on an exhibition.  The biggest problem with this class of hater is that it provides the intellectual arguments that the third, far larger class of haters employ for evil purposes

By far the most damaging class of All-Star haters are the guys who don't watch sports but feel the need to express forceful opinions on them, or as they are more commonly known, Colin Cowherd.

Three classes of haters, all with different agendas but united in their complete and utter wrongness.

Because the NBA All-Star game is fantastic.  You know what was awesome?  Almost everything that happened at this year's all-star weekend.

We had a rookie/sophomore game that featured Blake Griffin, Jeremy Lin, a pissed-off John Wall, Kyrie Irving, and the ever-present threat of  Big Cuz undoing all of the progress he's made and doing something monumentally stupid.

We had an All-Star game where Kevin Durant tried to make a claim to being the best player in the league, Lebron James beating him down with a fourth-quarter for the ages, and Kobe proving he's still the league alpha dog by talking smack to the game's best player while Lebron imploded.

And the best part?  We had one of the worst slam-dunk contests ever.  Complaining about bad TV is the surest sign that life has passed you by.  In the social media age, there is NOTHING better than bad live TV. Nothing produces more comedy, if you're subscribed to the right Twitter feeds.  Plus, even a bad slam-dunk contest featured a scrub that will never get minutes in a real game executing a double alley oop.  That should give even the most casual of Colin Cowherds an appreciation of the sheer amount of athleticism in the league.