Miss Piggy Lunchbox

It just occurred to me that I could very easily devote an entire daily blog to illustrating the sheer incompetence of Ron Gardenhire.

That may be a little harsh. The man has managed a Major League Baseball team for two full seasons, and he has made the playoffs in both of those seasons, so he has gotten results. I believe that the largest part of the job of managing a professional baseball team is being a leader of men and doing the day-to-day soft-skill things that keep the team focused and driven. And I do believe Gardy is good at those things. But as an in-game tactician, he is a moron that makes Bobby Valentine look like Joe Torre.

Two quick examples from tonight’s game, which I’m already chalking up as a loss:

1) Runners on first and second with nobody out in the fifth, and the Twins are trailing by three runs. They’ve had trouble scoring runs lately, and Radke’s not looking so great on the mound. So he has Rivas bunt, which ends up in a pop-up to the first baseman. Guzzie followed with a homerun, so maybe it’s best that Rivas didn’t hit into a double-play, but I still think it’s a stupid move. By the way, Guzman now has more homers than Manwich. Worst first baseman ever.

2) Gardy’s obssession with wins is manifesting itself in losses. Gardy is so hung up on making sure his starting pitchers get wins that the team ends up getting losses. He’ll constantly leave starters in trouble in the game when the Twins are tied or losing by only a few runs in the hopes that the guy can complete the inning and thus pick up the win when the offense suddenly comes alive in the next inning. It happened again tonight when he trotted out Radke, who did not have his best stuff against the Sox, for the seventh in a tie game. Things quickly snowballed on Radke and he came out of the game with two runners on and losing 6-5. The bullpen has been awful at preventing inherited runners from scoring lately, and tonight was no exception. By the time Raccoon got out of the inning, the Twins were losing 8-5. Seems to me that smarter use of the bullpen might have resulted in fewer runs and a better chance for this pathetic offense to come back. And it also seems to me that Radke might be happier with a no decision than a loss. Fans of the 2004 Twins should rue the day wins became a statistic for starting pitchers in baseball, because it is that statistic that is clearly affecting Gardy’s better judgment when it comes to getting wins for his team.

I’m getting married this summer, and I have the luxury of having a fiancee who is willing to put up with my crap throughout the whole process. My crap comes in a particularly aromatic form wherein I proclaim not to have any interest in any part of the planning, but then get wind of some minor detail that isn’t exactly how I would have done it and proceed to protest with a red-hot fiery passion. So in reality, I have a lot of interest in how the wedding turns out, but what I really want is for everybody else to read my mind and do all the work to build exactly the wedding I want. And on the cheap, too, even though I’m not footing the bill (I’m also very lucky to have the family/ies I do).

This weekend I went to a wedding that illustrated just how lucky I am, though. I don’t want to be too harsh because I really like the couple and I was honored that they invited me to take part in their union. I did, however, have a few qualms with the ceremony:

1) The ceremony was about two people and two people only: God and the priest.

2) It was over 30 minutes into the ceremony before anything relevant to bride or groom was mentioned.

3) The priest clearly did not have any knowledge of the couple.

4) The priest took a swipe at gay marriage in the homily. He started off with, “In this day and age when people are so eager to redefine marriage….” As he concluded this thought, he stated, “…for the benefit of future generations or lack thereof.” As if the homos are gonna take over society to the extent that the world is going to have an underpopulation problem. If only.

5) The priest was boring as snot. If you’re going to be reactionary, please at least be entertaining a la Rush Limbaugh.

Our wedding, by contrast, will have no god-centricty (s/he can come, but is no more prevalent than any other guest), will involve several friends and family members extensively in the ceremony, and will be humorous and fun.

I’m not saying my wedding is right for everybody, or that my friends’ wedding wasn’t right for them. But my friends’ wedding wouldn’t have been right for me, and I’m just very thankful that my baby is willing to work with me to give us a wedding that works for me. She’s the best fiancee of all time.

I’ll be in Italy for the next couple of weeks visiting her. It’ll be great.

Why am I blogging? I’m at least three years late to the party, which I think at that point was already a bloated abcess on the promise of self-publishing. I don’t really have a purpose or a theme, so I can’t imagine attracting any kind of audience for that. My written communication skills have declined greatly after spending the last six plus years (oh god, has it been that long) working for corporations. Even today I read one of my favorite authors (a blogger) decry blogs. So why did I decide to go through with it?

I think it’s because I spent so much time deciding not to do it, and that really started to get to me. I have no illusions of having anything valuable to say, nor do I think I can say it in any great manner. I do, however, find value in practicing my writing, which I think can be pretty good when I’m inspired, and I find value in journaling. The problem is that I don’t journal when the only expectation to do it is coming from myself. I alluded to this in my previous post, but I’m really doing this because the possibility of an audience will force me to write, and I hope to benefit from that practice.

So that’s it. I’m doing it for me. I don’t expect anybody to find what I have to say insightful. I’m just hoping to get the part of my brain that writes on the treadmill again.

If you find yourself reading this, then god help you. And while he or she is doing that, feel free to help me by offering me criticism on my writing. I don’t think I’m perfect and I enjoy improvement. So help me find my errors. But if you just want to turn away and cry, I’m fine with that, too. I’ll be here writing.

This is my assignment for my career counselor this week. She asked me to think about a self-directed system to recuperate and I’m having a hard time working through it. So why not force myself to write it out? Sometimes that helps me get my thoughts together.

But I have a hard time just opening up a word doc and typing into it. On the other hand, if I think somebody might actually read it…if I can tell myself there’s an audience out there somewhere, then I can force myself to write. I actually kind of hope nobody reads this, but without a potential audience I can’t write. So I finally decided I didn’t care if somebody happened to stumble across this…that it would probably be so bad that nobody would care.

The only thing I’ll lose here, then, is the ability to be completely frank and uncensored, so I hope that I don’t start fooling myself and believing the bendings of truths that I publish so as not to get myself in trouble with those in my life.

Righty-o then, the self-directed system to recuperate. My SDSR, if you will.

Well, maybe I should give a little more background. See, I have systems. And the systems are things I come up with on my own. My friend once mocked me, “My name is KEN. I like to make rules and follow them.” Well, that’s pretty accurate. Only now I’ve decided that what my friend calls rules I call systems. So there. Maybe someday I’ll have enough courage to actually describe one of my systems here to give you an idea of how they work or why they’re there, but for now I think I’ll keep them between my career counselor,my baby, and me.

And why did my career counselor ask me to put a system around recuperating? Well, she describes me as a “high creative” (I love that description, by the way), and she was telling me that high creatives output work in something kind of like a sine wave would look. So, while most people can chug along on a 8-to-5, five-days-a-week work week, high creatives have periods of massive output (peaks) followed by periods where there is very little output (valleys). It’s during these valleys that high creatives recuperate and regenerate their creative energy.

Whether I’m a high-creative or not (I tend to think I am), it seems to fit my life…I like the down periods, and when I get inspired, I like to work my tail off. And I have an awfully hard time maintaining consistent levels of effort. I’ve often thought that the solution was a job where I could work really hard for seven or eight months and have the rest of the year off. I’ve also thought one possibility would be to have a job where I work three fourteen-hour days a week.

I like this description of my work style a lot because it can now take the place of what I thought was laziness on my part. That doesn’t mean I’m not lazy, it just means that now I have another way of thinking about myself that I prefer. And that’s at least worth the price of admission.

Which brings me around, again, to the SDSR I am supposed to think about. And I am having a hell of a time. For one, I’m not sure I understand the assignment. For example, am I suppoesd to think of a SDSR independent of my current career and then find a career that fits that? I kind of did that a couple of paragraphs ago. And if that’s the case, is there something more I need to come up with than just an unusual work schedule? Or, is the assignment to create a SDSR that fits into my current job? Because that’s what I’m having such a hard time with.

See, I work at a job where the culture is such that you’re not expected to complete your assignments. I’m not sure if that sounds crazy to you, but I just looked at that last sentence and it still sounds crazy to me. But it’s how they work. It took me about a year of working there to understand this unspoken expectation, but now I get it. Management just piles tons and tons of work on you, with the expectation that you’re going to sort it out and get the highest priority stuff done, and as much of the medium priority stuff as you can.

I’m not sure what kind of benefit that sort of management brings to a company, but it’s clearly how the management at my company has decided they’re going to work. The problem with this, for me, is that it goes against some of the values I hold to very strongly, such as my sense of duty to complete everything asked of me in a very high-quality fashion.

In addition, I have a lot of stakeholders that rely on me to get things done, either myself or through my staff, and I feel a lot of pressure to provide for all of those stakeholders, even though the company doesn’t give me nearly enough resources to complete everything being asked of me. I like my stakeholders, and I want to give them what they ask for. And on top of that, I feel a huge sense of responsibility to be a great boss to my staff and to give them what they need, which is awfully challenging to do when there’s not enough time in the day to serve my internal customers and my boss. I like my staff, too, and I want to be a great leader for them.

So I don’t know how the heck I would create a SDSR for this job. I’ve tried a number of things: not working at all on the weekends, working on the weekends to start the week ahead, getting in early, staying late, working strict 8-5 shifts, drinking every night, staying sober all week, etc. And no matter what I try, it always seems not to lead to any kind of recuperation. The only time I’ve ever felt recuperated at my current employer was when:

1) I started out there and worked in support and support only. It was very clear what my priorities were, because I could look at the queue of service requests and knock them off in order of priority and created date. And then they started putting me on projects and it’s been hell ever since.

2) Right after a vacation. A weekend of three days seems to be just a little too short (but that might work if it was regular, and not so rare), and a break of four or more days seems to bring me back to work fairly energized. Of course, the first day back brings me right back to reality and the feeling of leaving important tasks unfulfilled, so that recuperation has never lasted long.

So that’s where I am with this assignment. And I’ll leave it at that for now since the Simpsons are about to start.