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I am such a cliché sometimes – Japan Blog No. 1

The “Atomic Bomb Dome”, the only structure left standing near the hypocenter of the atomic bomb dropped at Hiroshima.

Is it cliché for a trip to a foreign country to change you? Yeah. But it happened to me anyway.

I have always wanted to go to Tokyo – specially, Tokyo DisneySea (I know, I know). It is widely considered one of the top theme parks in the world (and boy howdy was it). But you also may have noticed that things aren’t going so great in the United States – have we had any new food recalls today? Say what you will about Donald Trump, good or bad, I think we all have to agree: shit is getting rough. A tweet once said that Trump’s admin felt like when Scar and the Hyenas took over Pride Rock in The Lion King. Kinda getting that vibe this time, aren’t we?

But I don’t want to talk about that guy, I have spent too much of my life doing that already. I am just setting the stage for this trip. As I told my friend Jordan, if we’re headed toward some kind of collapse, I want to have memories of Tokyo to hold onto. Turns out, that was a convincing argument.

So within the same summer, I booked and planned an entire 9-day trip to Tokyo. And like I said, it really changed me. But not in the way I imagined.

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You’re not going to miss the Coliseum, Raider Nation; you’re going to miss the party

I’ve been putting this off for a while.

Now, as any writer will tell you, this is normal. Writers hate the writing process, and the easiest way to get a reporter to clean their house is to assign a deadline. We procrastinate by nature, and we’ve all convinced ourselves that we write better under the gun. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant: it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don’t know if pressure actually makes us better, and no writer has ever turned anything in early so we could test it. I guess we’ll never know.

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What does it mean to be a leader? (the second part of Spring Break dispatches)

(Ed. Note – A previous blog was about managing my coed softball team, and it was supposed to be part one. Then a lot of events happened, so it got delayed until now. Here’s part two:)

What makes a good leader?

This is something I have spent many hours thinking about. What makes a good leader? I can tell you exactly the first time this thought crossed my mind. Working at Lowe’s, in college.

Let’s start with a couple of hot takes:

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‘For the kids, man’; on the challenge of a new semester and why I teach

For me, there is really only one reason to do anything in this world. The same reason Sammy Sosa used when he was caught with a corked bat in an MLB game in 2003.

“For the keeds, man. For the keeds.”

His excuse was that he used a corked (and therefore illegal) bat in batting practice to put on a show for the kids. Now, as someone who loves batting practice and has seen Khris Davis put on a show at the Coliseum, I don’t hate the excuse. Seriously, I saw Khris smash a suite window in batting practice once, about 425 feet from home plate. It was amazing.

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