The Return of the King

[I won't ask you to bear with me, but yes, sports will be involved... eventually]

[Also, Winfield tried to change my title. Not happening.]

Yes, it's been a while. It's a long story. After a certain bowl game, both of my parents were murdered by a bum with a gun. I spent the next 15 years in the care of the family butler, a troubled soul that longed for revenge. I eventually fled the country, found myself in a Chinese prison, and was rescued by a mysterious, bearded man who told me to fetch a rare flower and find him in the mountains. He then trained me in the ways of the ninjistu, but I could not sell my soul by killing a detained (albeit guilty) man. I then returned home, determined to protect the innocent from the wicked.

Actually, that's the story of Batman Begins. Sorry, my life isn't quite that awesome.

Yes, I've been on hiatus, but for good reason. Between school starting again (the biggest reason - I need to dropkick this semester in the scrotum) and for other happenings in my life, I've had to focus on other things. I'm getting older, and I know this because I'm becoming my biggest critic. I've also learned/reinforced some other values/dictums in my life. Two of the ones that stick out can be summed up in quick bits of wisdom.

1. Busy is not productive. In fact, being busy is usually directly at odds with being productive.

2. Doing something easy is usually bad for you, or isn't worth your time.


I finally broke down and began to read Timothy Ferriss's book, The 4-Hour Work Week. I won't recommend reading or not reading it, because no one reading this blog probably gives a damn. However, I will say that he does a good job stating the obvious. Most of the book is essentially about staying on task and avoiding interruptions. I did take a piece of his advice, and began to only check my email twice a day. My God, the difference! I thought I was acting like a grown-up by reading my e-mail all the time. I had a rough time juggling everything I was trying to do last semester, and Ferriss is right - your e-mail is probably your single biggest distraction. It is absolutely awful for productivity. Of course, I always felt connected, and always knew what was going on, and always had new information about where to be or what to do or what is funny careening into my eyeballs all of the time, but I couldn't focus on a damn thing. In the very short time that I have stopped checking my email accounts multiple times (read, continuously), my productivity level has skyrocketed and my stress level has taken a dive. It's great.

I'm telling you this because I want to apologize. I had a lot of posts that sucked (at least I think they did, because they were lazy), mainly because I was busy trying to do homework, study for a test, read something, call somebody, carry on a conversation, reading/writing an email, etc. when I was trying to blog. My bad.

The second part is actually part of the reason I couldn't bring myself to write anything for a while. Have you ever noticed that people who have GPS systems usually can't drive worth a shit, much less get to where they are going any more efficiently? Or how people who only watch cable news are usually the worst at describing the platforms and implications of said platforms of political candidates? That is basically how I feel about everyone (excluding Orson and Dr. Saturday, because, well, they do what they do better than anyone else) who had something to say about the National Champions, namely, who should be crowned the holder of the MNC. Put anyone who talked about how a playoff works better, and anyone who typed the words "let them prove/settle it on the field." [As I am typing this, I'm specifically avoiding checking to see if either I or Winfield or Bird ever said this. What can I say, I love it when people call me out in the comments, so much so I basically give them a proverbial lay-up.] Rereading the same, tired, boring "there should be a playoff, the corporations are evil" articles really left a bad taste in my mouth. It didn't make me hate football - it just made me hate talking about it.

If you came here in the past couple of weeks wanting to read what I had to say about Utah, Florida, Southern California and Texas, I'm sorry. Maybe I'm not cut out for being a CFB blogger. Maybe being willing to ruminate (as in the physical, chew something that has already been chewed like a freaking cow) the same tedious topics with the ridiculous, cookie-cutter (and usually easily refuted) dialogue really IS a requirement for successful blogging. We'll see. Maybe in three weeks, I'll never post again (that's definitely not the plan).

Hopefully you'll come back over and over again, and I can give you something to read that you haven't seen before. I'm not promising I'll always be unique, and I'm not promising that most of my post topics won't overlap with other blogs. However, I'm going to try my best to not take the easy way when it comes to writing. Hopefully, you will be able to tell.