Forgetting

I have a confession to make

I don’t remember my wedding vows
I would have to ask you to find
The paper I wrote them on
To remember all the promises I made.
I do remember the paper in my hand
marked up the night before
when the rain hit the window and I couldn’t 
Sleep. 
I know that I tried to tell you then
How much I love you and how surprised
I was that you loved me

I also don’t remember
Other poems I wrote you.
Other futile attempts to let you know how 
Much I love you 
and how surprised
I remained that you still loved me --
a love, growing deeper
Every day. Every foot touch, 
Every smile and kiss, and all the deep
Inhales of our scents 
as we try to experience
Loving each other with every 
way our bodies offer.

All Those words are gone, 
Blown away 
like the wind on the next day
As I saw you come down the aisle 
And there was only me and you.

I feel that every day, and I want to enjoy today
As I do every day, growing more in love,
Remembering
A promise is not just one day
But actions, repeated every day
Remembering 
Every day is special, not just today.

GRE Practice Essay: Mistakes are the best teacher:

In my experience, it is not the best way to teach by solely focusing on the positive actions and ignoring the negative ones.

What you will ultimately do, in teaching someone, is to both praise the positive actions and correct the negative actions. An example of this is best illustrated in sports. I was once a track coach, where I focused on teaching the throwers. These young men often have a good sense of their own raw power and would take to the discus or the shotput and try to just use their size and raw power to muscle the object as far as they could.

If we were just to focus on the throws that went well, there would be no improvement in the ultimate distance of those throws. The athlete would top out at what they could do, but to really improve in the task involves breaking down every aspect of the athlete’s form. When you are breaking down the athlete’s’ form, every step in the process is important.

Let us use as our example the discus. There is a tendency to want to grab the discus with your meaty paws and just heave it. But with beginners, you must finesse the throw. You grab the discus so that as you twist your body and throw the discus, it rolls off of your hand, spinning at about a thirty-degree angle through the air.

A successful discus throw is not just about the hand though. The hand is connected through the wrist and the elbow and down to the flow of the hips and the position of your feet. Once you learn how the discus feels as it comes out of your hand, then you can get a sense of that tacit knowledge of what it feels like when it is going right.

That knowledge is not gained just by going through what went right, but it is in constant repetition as you explore what went wrong. If your throw does not feel right, what is it that the student-athlete is doing that is not working for the best? Where are the mechanics off such that there is a definite problem with how the throw happened?

You must look at where things are going wrong and you cannot ignore these problems. Yes, you want to see things going well and you praise with positive reinforcement when it works well, but negative actions are not to be ignored. What the negative actions do is, in fact, allows for a place of learning. It is through making mistakes and examining the reasons that they happened that I find is the best sort of teacher. When you make a mistake, especially one that is visible and public to someone you want to impress, and examining that mistake is when you learn the most. If you did something well, of course you did it well, but that only happened because of all the other times that you did not do something well and you learned from your mistakes.

Two Years Sober

Sometime today, or yesterday I’m not sure, marked the second anniversary of the last time I had a drink.

It was a beer. I don’t remember the brand. I do remember that it was Memorial Day weekend. The Monday night. Anita was out of town with her family. I had been to a baseball game and a concert that weekend. I didn’t drink at the concert since I was driving, but I drank too much at the baseball game. It was a double header, and I panicked when I learned that they were stopping alcohol sales for the entirety of the second game so I drank four beers real fast.

I drank my last beer, cracking it after midnight saying to myself that it would be the last one for the night since I had to be at work in the morning. I didn’t drink it thinking it would be my last ever. I said to myself that I would lay off for a week. I had found myself drinking more, stressed by work and the political environment. A week off would be good. 

So I made it through that first week. I didn’t have anything on Wednesday, didn’t stop by Leo’s on Friday to stock up. And I felt ok. I never was one who needed to drink every day, but when I did, I drank too much. I switched from liquor to beer to control the amount, but then I sought out high ABV beer, rushing headlong into oblivion. 

I made it through that week. And then another. At some point, when Anita kept asking if this was forever, I decided that it would be a good idea to fully stop. It was never a big break, and though I never went to meetings, AA has one thing right – it is a day at a time.

I don’t like to define myself in the negative. Though I was clearly an alcoholic, the fact that I don’t drink anymore is not something that I want to define me, as I never wanted the fact that I drank too much to define me. But you are what you do as habit, and for fifteen years or so I was a self-destructive lush, and I appreciate those who stood beside me and loved me in spite of myself. 

It’s not all perfect. I used alcohol as a crutch for social anxiety, and so much of our society is based around drinking at events, like concerts and ballgames. The plus side is that by not spending a hundred bucks on beer, I can get better seats at games for the same price of the trip. I don’t lose my space at the front of the stage because I need to go get a beer at shows. I really thought I would lose weight by not sucking down those empty calories. I guess actually eating dinner is a trade-off. 

I am more present. Or, I think I am more present as a husband, student, and worker. There is more time in the week when you’re not losing three nights to the encroaching darkness. I don’t think I would have done it without the example of two of my friends, Jim Alcock and Derek Zanetti. Thank you for your positive influence. I hope I can play the same role for others.