Category: A Day in the Life (Page 5 of 10)

Returning to the stage

June 24, 2013 / Jared Cash

So, yesterday I had my first read-through since college.

Since college.

For those of you that don’t realize it, I graduated with a major in theatre with hopes and dreams of being a filmmaker. I’ve long been a writer and actor and had dreams of being a director, as well. Alas, life does not always follow our best-laid plans and I was set upon a different path. The good news is that my new path led me to the wonderful life I’m living now. I’m not sure whose path this was in the beginning, but I’m glad that sucker fell off of it so that I could take it. It’s an awesome path.

One of the great things about being me (of which there are many, but there’s only so much storage space on the Internet, and you’ve got better things to do than read 24 volumes of Jared Is Awesome: Here’s Why) is that I’ve got some truly spectacular friends. One of them happens to be a singer, songwriter, and playwright. In fact, she has one show that should be going up in New York in less than a month. She’s good.

It just so happened that she submitted a script to Kansas City’s Fringe Festival this year and she asked some of her friends to be in it. I was one of them (as was my beautiful wife). And so, yesterday, for the first time in 10 years, I sat down at a table full of creative types and started the process of turning myself into someone I’m not (except that this particular character is so easy to slip into that I think it will be a lot less work and a lot more play, something I’m quite excited about).

It’s a strange feeling to step back into something you haven’t done in a decade. It feels very comfortable, like an old shoe, but there’s a sense of dÃ©jÃ vu that’s hard to shake. I haven’t been this excited about something that isn’t related to my role as a father and a husband in quite some time. I was nervous right up until the moment I sat down and opened the script. And then, those nerves were gone and it was as though I’d never stopped doing this.

I’m really excited and I hope that all of you are excited, as well, because it’s very easy to come see the show.

It’s called MultitudesÂ and we’re performing July 20th, 23rd, and 26th at the Just Off Broadway theater in Kansas City, MO. Here’sÂ a link to the showÂ page. You can also buy tickets there, as well. They’re only $5, though you do have to purchase a Fringe Festival button (also $5) to see the shows that are part of the festival (even the free ones). You can also buy the buttons at the venue. Just check out the Fringe KC website if you want all the details.

And gentlemen, I can assure you that your ladies will think more of you if you take them out to aÂ playÂ instead of the movies or a club. There’s a certain level of class they just won’t be familiar with from other guys.

A sample morning

April 10, 2013 / Jared Cash

The phone rang. It was 8:17 and it was my first phone call of the day. I picked up the phone.

“Tech office.”

“I need your help troubleshooting a computer problem,” began the teacher on the line. “I can’t get the projector to work.”

“Did you restart it?”

“Yeah, it didn’t fix it.”

I rubbed my temple, knowing a headache was on its way. The familiar beep of another call to my line chirruped in my ear. I ignored it. I knew the most likely solution would require me to do a bunch of simple, but fancy techno-geekery to fix the computer. I wanted to do it in my office. I almost asked the teacher to bring it to me. I didn’t.

“Where are you? I’ll come to you.”

I made a mental note of the teacher’s room and hung up. I looked at the computer in my lap, completely forgetting for the moment what I was doing with it. The door to my office opened and the police officer assigned to my building walked through. He needed information on two computers that had been reported stolen. I started to print them out for him.

The phone rang again.

“Tech office.”

Immediately, the “call waiting” chime went off in my ear again. I ignored it. Again.

The librarian on the line needed help getting someone connected to the Internet. I listened patiently and mapped a path through the building to the two separate destinations I needed to go. I hung up the phone.

I looked at the computer, no longer able to remember the names of the students whose computers were stolen.

“What were the kids names again?” I shouted to the officer next door. He gave them to me. I looked at the computer on my lap again. I remembered which software needed to be installed on it and grabbed the appropriate flash drive. I stood to go make my rounds when a student walked through the door. I expected the phone to ring any second. The officer came to pick up his printouts and told me the student had done her community service to pay for her computer. I directed her to the treasurer and left my office, laptop in hand.

As I left the office area, the front desk receptionist stopped me.

“They need you in the library.”

I let her know that they got a hold of me and I was on my way up there. She immediately turned to finish her conversation.

I installed the software as I walked. I arrived at the library first. The moment I walked in, I was informed that the issue had been fixed. Another teacher popped in and mentioned the same. Turns out, it wasn’t something I could have fixed anyway, and they simply chose to use a different machine. One down, one to go.

I ventured back into the hallway and toward the stairs back down to the ground floor. I trekked across the commons and down the hall to the teacher with the projector issue. I found him at the very back area of the art room. I made my way toward the laptop when I heard him speak.

“I fixed it.”

“What?”

“I fixed it,” he said again. “I unhooked everything and hooked it all back up, and it worked.”

I suppressed a grimace, nodded to the teacher and said, “Okay.”

Secretly wondering why I bothered leaving my office, I left. I walked back across the building and sat down in my chair. The laptop was still installing software, so I set it down to finish. I looked at the clock. It was 8:26.

I took a deep breath and looked for my coffee mug.

The phone rang.

Writing and The Great Distraction Beast

April 3, 2013 / Jared Cash

I’ve spent over a year wanting to write more.

Honest.

Every day I sit down at my computer and think of all the projects and ideas I have that would require some attention. They scamper about my brain like rats, trying to avoid being caught. And the moment I manage to clamp a glass jar over one of them and start to examine it so that I can maybe drag 500 words out of it, The Great Distraction Beast rears its ugly head.

Someone knocks at the door, the telephone rings, my computer makes one of a hundred different “beep beep beeps” that mean something wants my attention. I try to tune these things out and focus, but fail miserably, time and again.

Worse still, there is always more content to consume. It’s very difficult to be a creator, but it’s oh-so-easy to be a consumer. Especially when you can lie to yourself that you’re consuming content to stoke the fires of creativity in your own mind. And so, after watching eight hours of Stargate on Netflix, even though you’ve already seen every episode at least twice, you sit down to write again, but all you can think about is watching more Stargate. Or that new web series that was just released. Or checking the news blogs to see if anything has happened since you last checked them 2 hours ago.

And there’s the rub. With so much content in the world and so little time to access it all, how does one choose what makes the cut and what doesn’t? And if one is a content creator, how does that same one cut off from it all and focus?

I’m asking, because I don’t know and I really need to know.

Writing used to be easy for me. I used to have pent-up anger and depression and all sorts of other feels that made me all angst-y and writer-y. But now, I’ve got a good life. Beautiful, loving wife. Three adorable children. Steady pay from a relatively easy job.

And so, I sit and I stare at a blank page and I choose to write about writing. Because anything else would probably be too hard, and plus TGDB is waiting for me to get a great idea so it can stomp it into oblivion.

I’m challenging myself to write every day. Even if I fail and only write once-a-week, it’ll be an improvement over now. But how do I hold TGDB at bay?

Okay, I’ve got a number of books to go try to read now. I should be done with them in about 30 years. Maybe I can write more then.

#BookmarkItForward

March 3, 2013 / Jared Cash

Yesterday, my wife came up with a fun idea to entertain our boys and to share a little bit of joy with The City by making simple, homemade bookmarks and taking them to the bookstore to slip into various books as a surprise. As we were working on the bookmarks, I got the idea to take a few photos and share them with the world as a way to promote reading.

So I now present to youÂ #BookmarkItForward. The idea is simple:

Make or buy some bookmarks.
Write the hash tag #BookmarkItForward somewhere on the bookmark. Be sure to include a design with a positive message for the lucky finder.
Slip them into a few different books at your local bookstore (we chose Half Price Books since they’ve got a wide selection of visitors and smaller footprint, increasing the likelihood of the bookmarks being seen sooner rather than later).
Post a photo and share it or just share this page with your friends, family, and social networks to encourage others to do the same.

That’s it! You’re all done!

Feel free to do this as many times and as often as you’d like and be sure to post photos with the same hash tag if you come across any bookmarks that you didn’t place.

Check out the album below for some photos of us making and placing our bookmarks. Now get out there and #BookmarkItForward!

The world gets smaller every year

December 20, 2012 / Jared Cash

As the year winds to a close, we start to think about all the remarkable things that have happened and look forward to what is to come next year. I can honestly say that 2012 will be one of the most memorable years of my life as I look back at all the amazing things that brought the entire world closer together. And on that note, check out this amazing video that captures a rather large majority of them here.

Wii U: First Impressions (SPOILER ALERT: It’s a pain in the ass, but fun to play)

December 11, 2012 / Jared Cash

The majority of this post was written as part of a survey for Nintendo about my first impressions of the system (some parts were edited or added later). Since writing it, I’ve finally been able to play the device and it’s quite fun. But, I’m still furious about the transition of purchased content from the Wii to the Wii U and will unlikely ever be happy unless Nintendo provides a way to restore lost functionality to particular games and/or allows for the re-transfer of content back to a Wii (highly unlikely). I look forward to seeing new games for the system, but will rarely, if ever, purchase digital content from Nintendo again due to their poor legacy support.

——-

I have rather mixed feelings about the Wii U. I love the GamePad and am really excited about the potential for new gameplay elements (as I always loved the GameBoy to GameCube connectivity of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles), but am a little disappointed in a number of execution missteps with a new system and legacy support.

First, having to download an update that takes over two hours just so that you can have full access to all the features of the Wii U when you take it out of the box is ridiculous. If a product isn’t ready, don’t ship it. Forcing someone to essentially download an entirely new software/firmware to their system before they can even begin using all of its features is ludicrous. Especially when that update loses connection repeatedly during the download. Thankfully, it picks up where it leaves off in the download rather than starting over or I would have simply returned the system.

Second, the transfer of content from the original Wii to the Wii U is clunky, slow, and treats original Wii owners like criminals. On top of that, it’s dangerously simple to lose all of your content that you paid money for during the transfer process. Since transferring the content to the SD card removes it from the original Wii and disables it from being used on that Wii entirely, if something happens to the SD card after, or if the Wii U crashes during import, all of your content is not only lost, but completely inaccessible. I was fortunate that, during my import of content, my Wii U only froze up while it was downloading a WiiWare title, which appears to be the final step in transferring content. Thankfully, my purchase history and save data had already been copied and I didn’t lose anything. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a horrible way to transfer content when companies like Microsoft can simply access your online purchase history tied to a specific account and allow you to specify a new console as yours and begin downloading your games to it. While this does allow the old console to continue playing games that were on it, it still prevents them from being redownloaded if they are deleted, thus ensuring that a person can’t simply purchase a new console and reliably sell their old one with all of their content intact, essentially “pirating” their content (which is, I’m sure, the primary reason why the Wii U’s transfer is so ridiculous).

Further, I’m a longtime Nintendo fan and I’ve always likened Nintendo to my other favorite company, Apple. However, the Wii to Wii U transfer is decidedly un-Apple and worse, it’s anti-consumer. Ignoring the fact that Apple lets you use purchased content on multiple devices for free, Nintendo has made the entire process such a hassle that it is easier for most users to simply repurchase the content they most want on their Wii U. Especially as they can continue to use the original Wii afterward. As it stands now, my Wii is completely unnecessary, since I can’t do anything with it except play Wii and GameCube games. Which means, it will only ever be used to play GameCube games, which is a huge waste of its awesome potential. On top of that, I’m not even sure I want to play any of my WiiWare and Virtual Console games on my Wii U as my only controller options are the Wii Remote and Classic Controller, which limits my gameplay options and restricts me to 4 players rather than 5 for TurboGrafx-16 titles and 8 for some WiiWare titles. This is beyond ridiculous and just highlights how poorly legacy support was implemented. Rather than forcing me to load an entire Wii emulator (or is it virtualized? not that it matters from a usability standpoint), legacy content should have simply been accessible from the Wii U menu and without all this painful jumping through hoops that leaves your original Wii a shell of what it used to be.

I truly hope that Nintendo has learned a valuable lesson from this system launch and recognizes that they are no longer playing in a world where they set the example and the rest of the industry follows. Microsoft is a terribly managed company that makes boneheaded decision after boneheaded decision, yet they have handled their console upgrade/transfer business significantly better than Nintendo has. Apple doesn’t even make consoles, yet they are consistently outselling and outperforming the competition because they know that what is most important is making life easier for their customers and treating them like responsible individuals. I have never pirated content for my iPhone or iPad, despite how easy it is to do so. Nor have I done so for my Xbox, even though it’s only slightly less difficult to transfer content to a new Xbox and sell the old one with a bunch of games still installed. I am not a criminal. Don’t treat me like one.

Third, the very day after installing a several gigabyte update just so I could use the damned thing, a new system update was required before I could play disc-based games. This one was a little over 2 gigabytes in size, so it only took a little over an hour to download and never disconnected during the process. But it didn’t change the fact that the system I purchased was unplayable for 2 straight days because I had to wait for system updates each time I sat down to play it.

I am a longtime, and loyal, Nintendo customer. Unfortunately, due to the current state of affairs for a Wii to Wii U owner, I may not be able to say that for much longer. As it stands now, IÂ highly recommend that anyone purchasing a Wii U leave their Wii content intact so that it remains a useful piece of hardware and simply ignore the Wii Menu channel on the Wii U except to play Wii games. You can always transfer your content in the future if you so desire.

Gender Analysis: Inconclusive

September 18, 2012 / Jared Cash

In an attempt to determine if the author of a blog I posted a link to in my previous post was male or female, I stumbled across this site that analyzes text to determine the gender of the author. It’s not perfect, as evidenced by the image above. Of course, I’m actually happy that I’m as gender neutral as it says. I wonder how it would feel about some of my earlier work.

Would you like that gift-wrapped? Our gift-wrap girl has a clean face

September 6, 2012 / Jared Cash

So, I was doing a little online bargain hunting today and I found the product I wanted for a really great deal. As I was going through the checkout process, however, I saw this:

I immediately stopped to check on the website I was ordering from. It seemed quite likely that it was from China, as I can’t imagine an American company being able to get away with this. I was right, and I soon went ahead and placed my order (sans gift-wrapping, I don’t care how much it helps that my gift-wrap girl is “Movie Fun” or “Super Dancer”). But it made me stop and think that someone out there had to stop and think, “You know, we don’t sell nearly as many gift-wrapped items as the other guys do. People just don’t seem interested anymore. I know! Let’s hire a bunch of slutty models in questionable outfits to pretend to gift-wrap our items and let those sad, lonely people out there pick which one they want to wrap their gift!”

The worst part, I think, is that someone out there thinks that these girlsÂ actually are busy wrapping all these gifts. As if “Big Eyes” and “Hot Body” can’t find better jobs out there.

Maybe they justÂ really love to wrap things. They should make a movie about a girl and her dream to wrap items at the biggest random crap warehouse in all of mainland China.

Flashwrap.

First Day of Fall

August 21, 2012 / Jared Cash

There is a tradition in my household. It started about 7 years ago, when my cousin (Andrew), my wife (Autumn), and I first discovered O’Fallon’s Pumpkin Beer. It’s an ale, brewed up with all the spices and flavors you’d expect of a pumpkin pie. It’s easily my favorite beer of all-time, and one of three major reasons I am always so excited for fall to arriveâ€”the other two being the weather and All Hallow’s Eve (or Samhain as my wife’s ancestors called it).

The tradition goes a little something like this. Fall starts the day O’Fallon’s Pumpkin Beer first arrives in the home. This year, fall came very early, and I was quite overjoyed. The picture above was the surprise my wife picked up for me during the day. It was a good evening.

Last year, I also spent a little time with Schlafly’s Pumpkin Ale, which is another great pumpkin beer, and my second-favorite drink of the season. Strong in flavor where O’Fallon’s is subtle, it’s worth having a sixer of both in your fridge. Especially if you’re like me and can’t resist having one-a-day. I haven’t picked up any of Schlafly’s yet this year, but I will do so soon.

I love autumn and Autumn. They’re my favorites.

Parenting, partying, and popular music (feat. Hot Problems)

August 18, 2012 / Jared Cash

My son Liam is three years old. He knows nearly all the lyrics to Rain Is A Good Thing by Luke Bryan and Party With My Friends by Hot Problems. A lesser person might be concerned about the fact that his two favorite songs (both of which he will begin singing at the drop of a hat if the correct words are uttered) are both about drinking alcoholic beverages. Maybe one day he’ll become some sort of party messiah in college, leading the entire campus into a new era of awesome partying. At the very least, he’s probably the kid that will lead every gathering of his friends in raucous “beer caroling” (actual beer optional).

Honestly, I’m okay with this. If he’s half as much fun as an adult as he is now, the world is in for a reckoning.

His older brother, Avery, went through a similar phase, in which he would repeatedly request music that was geared toward adults. He knew many “kid songs” growing up, but always preferred to hear Indie Rock Girl by (the now defunct) TV/TV or anything by Dragonforce.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Adelaide only wants to listen to Nirvana and Pearl Jam.