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To What Is, not What Might Have Been

Unanswered prayers. Twists of fate. Unfulfilled desires. Foiled plans. Typically, phrases like these evoke negative images for us. Our minds conjure thoughts of “the one that got away,” be it a person, a job, an opportunity, or something entirely different. We kind of enjoy torturing ourselves this way because the idea of “what might have been” can make for a very compelling story. There are movies, books, and songs written in lamentation about what was lost. It’s also a common storytelling trope to have the protagonist revisit the missed opportunity years later.

But isn’t that all just imagination? That’s literally what “wishful thinking” is. We concoct our own little story about what could have happened if circumstances had unfolded differently, and it just so happens that >gasp< it would have been SO wonderful, if only… Today I say: Hogwash. Fiddlesticks. Malarkey. Poppycock. Baloney. [Insert your favorite old-timey dismissive phrase here.] Twists of fate are a part of life, whether you believe God has a hand in what happens to you or not. That’s why there’s an adage that “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” We’re like kids at Christmas. Make our list of gifts, talk to Santa, hint to our parents, and cross our fingers that we’ll get what we want. And remember, we also make choices all the time, every day. And sometimes a single choice has a significant effect, creating a chain of proverbial dominos that fall to produce our circumstances – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Remember, too, that we are also often affected by other people’s choices, so even when we’ve planned and prepared and prayed and chosen wisely – some other choice, some other circumstance, some other event impacts us and throws off our proverbial path. And while it may seem crushing to us in the moment, I’m here to tell you it’s often for the best.

Last week, I wrote about the choice I made with my wife to marry each other 31 years ago. It’s a choice that feeds me positively each day, but a mere 5-6 years earlier, things could have been different. I had dated a young lady for a couple of years going back to high school. We broke up after she left for college, but one summer we reconnected and began to get kind of serious, even discussing whether we might be interested in marrying. Then she went back to school and met someone else – the man who would ultimately become her husband. (They’ve been happily married for 35 years.) After that second breakup, I immersed myself in school, embarking on my first semester since high school where I made straight A’s. I also worked a lot, did some traveling, and eventually met my future wife. Time for a pop culture reference – Ted Lasso: “It may not work out how you think it will or how you hope it does. But believe me, it will all work out, exactly as it’s supposed to.” And for both myself and my old girlfriend from high school, it absolutely did.

Fast forward to 2025, when I finally completed the steps need to retire from K-12 public education. I wrote about how I had actually applied for one more administrative role in a nearby district, and I honestly believe I was on the cusp of getting hired. Then I received the dreaded “we’ve selected a different candidate e-mail.” Curses! Foiled again! Or was I? Ironically, I read that e-mail on my phone in a medical center waiting room while my wife underwent a scan for breast cancer tissue. That test eventually came back positive for “cancerous material” — not really cells, more like particles. So she had to undergo more tests and a surgical procedure, along with follow-up appointments. Guess who was by her side every minute? This guy…without ever having to give a thought to whatever work I was missing or would have to catch up on at my new job. I truly consider it a blessing that I could have zero other concerns during that time. Just her. And shortly after that situation was resolved, along came a part-time opening working in the office at my church parish. So instead of more potentially soul-crushing work in education, I landed in a calmer job that supplements my retirement income while allowing me time and flexibility to continue to build my voiceover career. The plan didn’t go off the rails; it just shifted to some different rails that, in the end, have followed a better path.

See, I’ve already had career plans go off-kilter in the past, and learned hard lessons from trying to “reset the plan.” It actually wasn’t all that long ago – a mere 8 years. I was working in Mansfield ISD at the time, under Dr. Teresa Stegall’s leadership in the Department of Research, Assessment, and Accountability. I’ve spoken fondly of Dr. Stegall’s leadership before. Right around this time in 2018, she retired from public education, receiving a well-deserved fond farewell from many in the district. She had previously informed me that she hoped for me to take over as Director of the department and had involved me in several tasks in preparation for the role. I had worked with central administrators and principals on a variety of projects, and I felt poised to step into the job. Trouble is, in the month after her retirement, the rest of us in the department heard nothing about the future – the Director position was never posted, and we were simply carrying on without a director. We heard rumors, but nothing definitive. Until the last Friday of February 2018, when Dr. Stegall’s supervisor met with us to inform us that the district was not, in fact, replacing her as Director. They were instead dissolving the position, using the money from that salary for other purposes, and placing our department under the supervision of a different Director in central administration. What’s more, we were charged with revising our duties to absorb the tasks of the Director, AND we had to take the department’s budget and devise our plan for the 2018-19 school year. Rug, yanked. Gut, punched. What the heck, I’ll even go there: Nuts, kicked. My plan had been to transition into a promotion, ramp up the VO career a little more, then retire from MISD – the only district where I had ever worked – after 30-35 years, then move into VO full-time. Instead, throughout my 25th year in the district, I found myself a little overworked, a little bitter, and a little bit off the rails.

So when I tried to regain control of the plan by bolting for Birdville ISD in the Spring of 2019, my hope was to get back onto my rails, albeit elsewhere. But it was a brutally failed effort that I’ve talked about briefly before. I don’t really want to relive it or recount details of how awful it was; it was mainly a year I’d like to forget. I suppose the most powerful thing I could say is that, when the COVID pandemic shut us down in March 2020, I was actually a little relieved. For the final six weeks of that year, I didn’t have to make the drive to Haltom City each day for a job that was slowly driving me insane. Work-from-home agreed with me, even if I had to conduct a job search for 2019-20 via Zoom. And even then, after my attempt at restoring the rails to a previous career path flamed out, there was yet another twist of fate that delivered me to Grand Prairie High School, working with a group of people who were mostly doing their absolute best to serve a student population that needed it. I made many lifelong friends there and encountered colleagues who I admired greatly. I learned from them, and I was able to teach them some things while keeping them entertained; and keeping them sane amidst the insanity that TEA and the district expected me to bring them as the testing coordinator. That is, until I finally had the wherewithal to bring my education career to a close and pursue voiceover full-time.

Do I regret my choice to leave Mansfield for Birdville? Not really. Given the events of February 2018, chances are that there might have been more potential gut punches along the way. The precedent had been set, and staying there could have sent a message that I would simply solider on, regardless of the circumstances. I’ve said before – central administration in education can be a little soul-crushing. That’s the nature of it. One of my colleagues in that department had a Ph.D in Statistics, and there’s a good chance that he might’ve been selected over me for the Director position. A choice to remain in MISD could have definitely produced some other twist, possibly worse than what I had already experienced. That year of misery in Birdville was at least instructive. I learned from it, as we often do from a painful experience. And just like Ted Lasso said, it did work out exactly as it was supposed to. I’ll take the exploits that I had and the friends I made at GP, thank you very much. And I’ll take the time supporting my wife instead of another central office job, as well. I have landed where I wanted to be – escaped from what had become an increasingly insane and stressful world of education, engaged more fully in the world of voiceover, and most of all, available more completely to my wife and family. Unanswered prayers? No, just different answers than I expected. Foiled plans? No, just slightly altered plans. Unfulfilled desires? No, As the great Sheryl Crow sang: “It’s not getting what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.” As it turns out, what I’ve got IS what I wanted. The path to get there is just not what I envisioned at one time.

The path can vary for many of us. I have two friends who have had similar experiences recently, where their intended professional plans have been altered by circumstances. One of them is currently teaching in New Mexico and had actually interviewed for the same position in the DFW area twice, finishing second both times. His current situation in NM isn’t the greatest, but it’s also not the worst, so his goal is simply to carve a different path back to DFW, and possibly back to New Mexico another time. Meanwhile, one of my friends from GPHS was passed over for that campus’ Principal position when it was open in 2024. She’s having to toil at another campus – again, not the greatest job – but her personal life has thrived even though she’s not where she wants to be professionally, and those personal developments wouldn’t have been possible at all if she was Principal of a 6A high school. There’s still plenty of time for her to achieve her professional goals. Again, it’s just going to be a different path, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all live and learn along the way, carrying whatever knowledge, experience, and growth that are gained.

In the world of voiceover, “rejection” is a natural part of the process, a way of life. My friends in the VO world are used to hearing “No” in the face of grand plans. Really, they’re prepared for “No” after every audition. Except that it’s not necessarily “No,” it’s just “Not Right Now,” as they say. Just because someone else is booked for a given VO job doesn’t mean you weren’t good, or worthy; it just means that whoever made the casting decision selected a different voice for this project, for a reason that could be very specific or very ambiguous. And that’s really the point of this post: Unanswered prayers, unfulfilled desires, twists of fate, foiled plans don’t necessarily reflect on us as individuals. They don’t mean we’re not valuable as people, or professionals, or artists. They just mean that this isn’t the right match, the right time or place, the right circumstances. Not Right Now. But we keep at it, working toward what we seek. Enjoy the journey. Learn what you can. Value the good things and the good times. Seek, and you will find. Right Now will eventually come along, and What Is will outshine What Might Have Been.

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Gotta Have Soul, Mate

This week’s post coincides with what I consider one of the 3 most important times of the year. You might think, “He’s talking about the resolve to maintain your New Year’s Resolutions,” based on one of my previous posts. Or perhaps you suspect it includes my thoughts on Valentine’s Day. But more important to me than literally any Valentine’s celebration is the anniversary of the wedding of myself and my better half on this date, January 28. Today we will celebrate the completion of 31 years or marriage.

“Awwww,” you might say. And that’s fine, although I am definitely not a person of extraordinary sentiment. Sure, my wife and I love each other deeply, but if anything, we are extraordinarily private about it. Anyone expecting to see PDA from the two of us will be sorely disappointed. What you will see from us, more than anything, is a personal rapport that we share. Plainly put, we get along at a fascinating level. Not all the time, but more than enough. We use the phrase “hashtag married” (#married) way more than we have ever expected, so much that we will literally each hold out two fingers toward each other to create the hashtag symbol. Maybe it’s cute; I don’t know. In some ways, I consider it akin to a pair of Mandalorians saying “This Is The Way.” Our little ritual.

Our road to such rituals has been interesting, but it’s not like we overcame any epic hurdles to get here. I was born in El Paso, Texas (Native Texan, baby!) and moved to Arlington shortly after my 3rd birthday. She was born on Long Island, New York, moved to the Houston area as a child, then came to Arlington in her early teen years, a little more than a decade after I arrived. We actually lived within 5 minutes of each other and even went to the same high school, but because I was 3 years older than she was, we never attended the same school campus through grade 12. Our high school only had Grades 10-12 under one roof at the time, and junior high was Grades 7-9. We actually met once when I was a freshman at UT-Arlington, introduced to each other by the girl I was dating at the time. But it wasn’t until I was a senior at UTA and she was a freshman that we started dating, connecting as members of the “band without football,” the UTA Marching Band. Some people might think we dated too long, because it took 4 years, 5 months, and 4 days for me to propose. That may seem like an eternity to some, but I think we both wanted to have a decent foothold as real human adults with careers and a mild sense of independence before we crossed the threshold of living life together.

Having heard that story, and if you observe our endearing rapport (truly, we are kind of cute together), you might even say, “Gosh, you two are real soulmates.” But here’s the thing: I don’t subscribe to the traditional notion of soulmates. The whole concept of “someone’s lobster” from Friends is purely fictional, IMO. I am very much an empirical guy. Even though I didn’t stick with math as a major in college (it was my initial choice), I’m definitely someone who believes in the power of math to bind the world together. (Shoutout once again to Pythagoras.) Numbers don’t lie. And the numbers say that the concept of one singular soulmate for each human simply cannot work. There are currently over 8 billion people on Earth. Even back in 1989, the year that my wife and I started dating, there were just over 5 billion people. With that kind of astronomical number, the notion that there was a single individual destined for me – someone who was of the opposite sex and heterosexual like myself, age appropriate, with similar interests, upbringing, and values – I mean, come on. Oh, and she happened to live incredibly close to where my family had moved 18 years earlier, and we even attended the same church even though we didn’t know it yet. That just doesn’t work, mathematically speaking. If there was such a person, probability at least suggests that this person might not live nearby – heck, she might live in another country across the globe and speak an entirely different language. 

So for me, the likelihood that there was one, true soulmate who I could ultimately marry was low. Incredibly low. Given the rate of divorce in the United States, the likelihood that most of the people getting married on January 28, 1995 – or literally every other date since then – are soulmates, is also shockingly low. Even the families of myself and my wife suggest this. I have four siblings — one has been married and divorced, the other three married people who were, themselves, previously married and divorced. My wife has three siblings, one of whom has been married and divorced and is currently married to a man who was also previously married and divorced. Another sibling is unmarried, and the third has been married to the same woman for 15 years now (first time for both there – so there’s one besides us). The point is, seeking and finding “your one true soulmate” is, by and large, an exercise in futility, mathematically speaking. At the most, if soulmates exist, then it would be more likely for each person on the planet to have multiple potential soulmates walking among us, and the trick, if there is one, is to find each other and offer enough effort and flexibility in our lives to become actual soulmates. This person doesn’t have to be your destiny, fated strictly for you, to make it possible to be with them. Sometimes you just have to step up and ask her out, then if she is compatible for you, put in the work with her to make the relationship flourish and grow.

But here is the bottom line, on this day of our 31st Wedding Anniversary: Regarding my own empirical biases and mathematical thinking, it really doesn’t matter. Is my wife the single, true soulmate who was created just for me? My sole soulmate, if you want to get punny? Who cares? I found her, and she found me. We fell in love, got married, and built a life together of which I am incredibly proud and for which I am incredibly grateful. That life has never been perfect – and neither are we – but we’ve been perfect for each other, and that’s really all that matters. If you read my post earlier in January, referencing Pythagoras’ quote, “Choices are the hinges of destiny,” then you can understand the critical effects of our choice on this date 31 years ago. That choice established our destiny together. It changed us, focused us. I firmly believe it’s made us better as individual people. We can share our love of sports, movies, music and musical theater, art, and animals, among other things. We can endlessly quote Grosse Pointe Blank without missing a beat. As two people who are honestly fairly cynical about Valentine’s Day, we even get to ignore it by celebrating our wedding anniversary two weeks earlier instead. That’s our choice, together.

I’m reminded of a favorite movie of ours, The Family Man, and its best line of dialogue:

“I love you, and that’s more important than our address. I choose us.”

If you’re familiar with that movie, then you also know the implications of the fateful choice – that it might come with some perceived limitations. We may give up certain things in terms of career, living arrangements, and perhaps material wealth when we prioritize relationships. But that’s actually the whole point of the movie, and of married life itself: Whatever “could have been” matters not to me; what matters is what we have, who I am as a result, and what is. Maybe my life is different with her than it would have been without her. I don’t know, but more importantly, I’m really not interested in knowing. Our married life, our existence as a family, are what matter most. Yes, there are challenges. There are times when one or the other of us is infuriating to the other. There are disagreements. But that’s part of being human, part of “For Better, For Worse,” isn’t it? And for us, “For Better” happens much more often. The challenges are minimal in the grand scheme of things. How about another pop culture reference, this time from the great Leslie Higgins on Ted Lasso: “If you’re with the right person, even the hard times are easy.”

When it’s all said and done, there is one person whose hand I want to hold during a concert, a musical, a walk in the park, or anyplace else. There is one face I want to see before I go to bed at night and first thing each morning. A face that I can always pick out in a crowd. There is one person with whom I always want to share the events of my day, my fears, my dreams, my very life. At the same time, I want her to have her own life and share it with me. Our lives don’t have to revolve around each other – she certainly doesn’t exist solely to serve me and our family, which is how I’ve come to view my own mother’s life. (That’s another topic I’ll have to unpack later.) But our lives create harmony together in a way that enhances each of us as individuals and feeds our family in a very beautiful and fulfilling way. Does that make us soulmates? I don’t know. I don’t care. What I do know is: I choose us. Happy Anniversary, sweetheart.

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Refurbishing My Hinges of Destiny

If the phrase “Hinges of Destiny” in the title of this post sounds familiar, that’s because it refers to a quote attributed to Pythagoras: “Choices are the hinges of destiny.” Most of us know the name Pythagoras because we learned the Pythagorean Theorem in geometry class. And Pythagoras is widely considered the “Father of Mathematics” (or the “Father of Numbers”) because he’s credited as the first person to view mathematics as a broader discipline, connecting numbers to philosophy, music, and even the universe. People relate Pythagoras to math, but he was really a philosopher above all, so what better person to quote in a catch-all blog called “On the Brink of Instruction?”

Now, I do not claim to be an authority on Pythagoras or Pythagoreanism, but the multi-disciplinary nature of his views and teachings are fascinating to me, especially as someone who taught economics for two decades. Anyone who’s taken high school economics knows that it is typically A) a requirement for graduation and B) not considered the most interesting class, on its face. Economics is often called “the dismal science” for a reason. So as an instructor, my goal was always to connect the study of economics to the broader “real” world, to make it more relatable for my students. I would always start each semester framing the study of economics as, truly, the study of choices. People take limited resources – the textbook factors of production being land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship, along with others such as time, talent, and energy – and we figure out how to use them in the most productive and efficient possible way to achieve the best possible outcome. My class would obviously layer in the standard terms and concepts of the economics curriculum, since that’s the course, but not before we considered more philosophical ideas about choices affected by given constraints. “What do you want to do with the next minute of your life? The next hour? The next day? Week, Month, Year, Decade?” The fundamental core of the course was that economics is the study of how and why we make choices, and what happens as a result – the consequences of our choices, which ultimately produce our circumstances. That was the underlying framework.

Choices are proverbial building blocks for our lives, determining not just our circumstances but also our personalities and our character. Plus, choices also happen to be excellent fodder for memorable quotes and memes in pop culture. I’m a particular fan of “He chose…poorly. You have chosen wisely,” from Indiana Jones and the the Last Crusade. The importance of choices is a perfect continuation of my thoughts in my last post on the nature of New Year’s resolutions. And given the sentiments I’ve expressed in still another post about how my overall goal at this stage of life is mainly to be the best version of myself that I can be, some thoughts on choices would be a great starting point.

I’m not going to pretend to be an authority on humanity’s choices, behavior, psychology, or any connection among the three. There are a myriad of resources available in libraries and on the internet that provide exhaustive analysis. There are also therapeutic resources for those who need them to address their own personal choices. I can only speak to my own experiences, thoughts, and ideas regarding my efforts at resolutions in service to my personal goals for the year in terms of my voiceover career, my relationships, my health, my well-being, my daily life, and even my place in the world, lofty as that might sound. Those efforts are framed by a variety of things, including my faith, my family and friends, my personal history, my existing knowledge about psychology and behavioral adjustments, my influences, and really, my perspective of who I am now and who I want to be in the future. So this post offers personal musings that I hope might be useful to the reader, as opposed to some kind of help guide rooted in science and research.

With that in mind, I am beginning 2026 by carefully considering each day, perhaps even each hour, and determining how I want to spend it. Even now, as I write this post, I have decided that I’m spending the next X minutes writing, then I will stop and proceed to another task that needs to be done. Unless, of course, I get “on a roll,” and I need to make an adjustment to whatever plan I might have in real time. The process of resolution, and carrying it out – behavior modification, in a sense – is difficult because it’s often fluid. We wake up each day with the notion of “Today I’m going to…,” but perhaps something alters the plan. Maybe we wake up later than we intended. Maybe we devote more time than intended to a particular task, reducing the available time for other tasks. Maybe an emergency arises. Maybe we get sick. Maybe we just feel like doing something else instead of what we planned to do.

The constant process of adjustment in the face of our proverbial plans is really at the core of whether or not we will make the appropriate choice at the time we need to make it. And it truly is a constant process. What time will I wake up? How do I respond if my spouse wakes up in a bad mood? How do I react if I wake up in a bad mood – what do I do to correct it? What’s the first thing I will do today? Should I change lanes here, or there? How do I respond when another driver cuts me off? How do I react if a person at the store is rude? How do I address it if the restaurant gets my order wrong? What do I do if the grocery store is out of the item I intended to buy? Where do I go if I need help for an unexpected problem? Do I make this purchase? Do I really need that item? Do I need to eat more or less of this kind of food? Should I take the time to watch this TV show? What happens if I just take a few minutes to play that game on my phone? What about that book I want to read? In a free society that allows the individual to choose, questions like these can actually become overwhelming. I think it’s the main reason why so many New Year’s resolutions fail – we have good intentions, we’d really like to change, but when that important moment arrives and we need to choose restraint, or kindness, or exercise, or self-care, or remorse, or fruits & vegetables, or a little extra work, we lack impulse control. Or we revert to old habits. Or we embrace comfort and familiarity instead of the change we claim to seek.

Assuming we truly want to change and truly seek new goals for ourselves, then it is in those moments that making new choices, different choices, is the most critical. And as you might expect, it really takes thought, conscious consideration, and yes, work to make it happen. I used to teach drum major camps – every summer for 16 years. Every camp included leadership as part of the curriculum, which usually meant extensive discussion about how the students could influence and inspire their band members. And at every camp, without fail, we heard the question, “How can I help my band be more disciplined?” My answer typically followed the same theme: Discipline Is Habit. You can walk out of this camp saying you want your band to be more disciplined, but doing so will not magically give you a more disciplined band on Day 1 of band camp. And Day 1 of band camp won’t be nearly enough. You will have to plan on how to approach every rehearsal, every football game, and every performance, and you will have to follow through on that plan every time. The less disciplined your band has been in the past, the harder it will be – the harder you will have to work, the more effort you’ll have to expend, the longer it will take. The efforts will have to continue well past the heat of August. It will likely be hardest in mid-September, when it’s still kind of hot outside, you haven’t fully learned your show yet, and there hasn’t yet been a meaningful performance. That’s when you’re most likely to see a backslide into old, undisciplined, unproductive habits. And that’s when it is most critical to maintain your efforts toward your new choices, your new habits, your new goals. You may not realize that you’ve actually become “more disciplined” until months after deciding on it as a goal. And you will only achieve it through day-to-day effort over time.

So it goes with New Year’s resolutions. The old mantra of “21-day to create a habit” is a myth. Psychology researchers at University College of London did a study in 2009 that found, on average, it takes 66 days to establish new habits – although it can vary, depending on how simple or complex the habit is. You could theoretically establish a simple habit within the old 21-day timeframe, but something more involved might take over 250 days, so you’d better be ready to spend the better part of the next year putting in the work. That work will involve choices – intentional choices – over and over, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Those choices will eventually turn into habits. Those habits might eventually become rituals, in a sense. And so long as those rituals lead us toward who we seek to be, then we know our efforts have been productive. But we won’t know it until the weather is much warmer. The conventional wisdom Is that most resolutions are abandoned by the second Friday of the year. Two Fridays! I can’t decide whether to call that pathetic or disheartening.

But that’s really what it comes down to, and I would like to think Pythagoras himself would appreciate it: Change Takes Work. Additionally, change takes time; it takes persistence. It’s the combination of persistent work over time that really leads to success, or the lack of it produces failure. It really leaves no room for excuses. No attempts to justify falling into old habits. No telling ourselves “I’ll get back to it again” when it’s convenient. Convenience, too often, is the mortal enemy of change. Persistence, meanwhile, is change’s best friend. I’m reminded of Jerry Seinfeld’s story about his own habits as an aspiring comedian. It took a simple wall calendar and a marker. His goal every day was just to write a joke; one joke per day. Once he wrote a joke, he marked a big X over that day on the calendar. Eventually, he had developed a chain of Xs on the calendar. The goal over time was, Don’t Break the Chain. That’s it. Nothing about outcomes. Nothing about the type or nature of the joke. Not even anything about how funny the jokes were. Just one joke per day, mark the X, do it every day. Does the rest “take care of itself?” Yes and No – there are obviously other aspects of comedy that Seinfeld worked on – delivery, timing, wording, etc. But the fundamental building block of his comedy career rested on making the conscious choice of committing to the work – writing one joke per day, until it became a chain, a habit, a ritual that fed his ultimate goal as a performer.

Personally, I will admit that I have established some lofty goals for myself in 2026, both in my voiceover career and as a person. I just might be more driven than ever about my 2026 resolutions, primarily because I’m no longer beholden to the K-12 public education career that had begun to weigh me down for several years. I have too often, in years past, used constraint, not convenience, as my excuse for abandoning my goals – my work in education got in the way then, but no more. I now get to pursue a career that offers me more control. I’m lucky that the constraints are now released, so I really believe the only things likely to hold me back are my own faults – laziness, apathy, excuses, comfort, bad habits. My limitations would be primarily self-imposed, so I intend to get out of my own way, get off the proverbial bench, and get after what I seek. Clean up and open my own proverbial “hinges of destiny,” as it were. I sincerely hope the people I can positively impact along the way will benefit from it. For you, friends, my wish is minimal constraints on your own goals, as well as maximum effort and energy toward your own pursuits. Choose wisely.

Speaking of new choices in 2026, I’m choosing to alter how I approach my blog, On the Brink of Instruction. I began back in August 2025 with weekly posts on either Tuesday or Wednesday. Going forward in 2026 and beyond, I will only offer new posts every other week. During the intervening weeks, I will post an audio version of the previous week’s post. After all, as a professional voiceover talent, it makes sense for me to take time to showcase my thoughts in my own voice. I will also be working on adding audio versions of my 2025 posts the best I can. Perhaps this new approach may offer new insight into just how warped and tortured my psyche became after 3 decades in education, and even new hopes for my attempts to claw my way back to actual humanity. OK, maybe that’s dramatic. But you get the idea.

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Bring on the Next One

Today is New Year’s Eve, and the second of my Top 3 favorite holidays is the magical combination of New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day. I wrote back in November about the first one – Thanksgiving. And I will write about the third of my Top 3 when it arrives in 2026. But for today, I have to say I love me some New Year.

No doubt, there are some who love NYE for the booze, the partying, the dancing, the Ball Drop, the confetti and fireworks, and all the other ceremony that goes with the night. And I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, if it’s your thing. Personally, I’ve never been a huge party guy, nor a heavy drinker. Growing up, I typically watched New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with the great Dick Clark. Watch the Ball Drop, then stay up an extra hour until midnight officially occurs in the Central time zone and call it a year. As I got older, I celebrated at small gatherings at friends’ homes, but never attended the large parties you hear about.

Then on December 31, 1994, my wife (at the time, my fiancée) and I went to a NYE party at a hotel in Dallas just before we married in January 1995. It was cool – we were young and obviously excited as we rang in the year of our impending marriage in a large gathering. It was something neither of us had ever done before. In ensuing years, we attended big NYE parties a few more times, including overnight hotel stays and breakfast the next morning. Those were fun times for a newly married couple, but we’ve outgrown them. These days, with our kids (who are quintessential home-bodies), New Year’s Eve consists of a quiet night at home. We compile some finger foods and munch away while watching a movie, then turn on one of the national NYE broadcasts from New York to see coverage of the Ball Drop, which happens at 11:00pm local time. In fact, anymore we actually go to bed right afterward and don’t even stay up until midnight. The big countdown in Dallas-Fort Worth just pales in comparison to what happens in New York, so rather than stay up for an anti-climax, we just call it a year early and get that hour of sleep. Some may call us boring; I consider us smart.

We have toyed with the idea of taking a bucket-list trip to New York specifically for NYE. There are hotels in Times Square with rooftop views of the Ball Drop, and we would definitely opt for something like that instead of standing all day with 500,000 of our closest friends, hoping we don’t have to go to the bathroom too often. Sure, those hotels have to be booked years in advance, with a minimum 5-night stay at a premium price. But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and someday we might actually do it.

All reminiscing and fantasizing aside, my love for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day comes down to two fundamental reasons. First, it’s still technically Christmas, only less stressful. See, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Christmas Day. It’s awesome as a central holiday in the year, and there is nothing quite like singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” at Midnight Mass. I tear up literally every time. I also enjoy many things about the Holiday Season – Christmas music, lights, decorations, movies, almost all of it. But what drives me insane about Christmas is simply “the rush” during the days leading up to December 25. The rush to buy things. The rush to do things, like make this dish for that gathering, or go to this other event because it’s a tradition. The rush is always tiring, and too often it’s easy to sacrifice quality for volume. And before you know it, it’s Christmas Day, and by the night of December 25, you’re just tired. Plus there’s a major letdown because it’s over until next year, when we’ll rush, rush, rush again in hopes of buying, getting, and doing it all in preparation for another December 25.

Except Christmas isn’t actually over yet, and it took me many years to truly appreciate that. After all, there are twelve days of Christmas, right? That leads to the Epiphany and the arrival of the Three Kings. In the Catholic Church, we officially celebrate Christmastide until the Baptism of the Lord a week later. And hardcore traditionalists may even celebrate Christmas until Candlemas on February 2 and the Presentation of the Lord. Now that is some serious Christmas celebration, along with perhaps a great excuse why you still have lights on your house.

Either way, I have always enjoyed the celebration of the New Year because it’s Christmas without the proverbial baggage. You still get to enjoy the decorations, the music, the free time, and the celebration, just without all the pressure. I cannot believe that there are people who actually complain that they forget what day of the week it is between December 25 and December 31. That’s the beauty of it! The freedom to relax and simply enjoy is rare and precious. Forgetting the day of the week is affirmation that you’re experiencing such freedom.

Beyond the extension of the Christmas season, I appreciate the New Year celebration secondly because it commemorates conclusion and commencement. I’ve always been fascinated by this phenomenon. Everything has a beginning and an end – seasons, years, life itself. There’s an inherent beauty in it. Think about it: Everyone loves Opening Day of the baseball season, a beginning. Millions watch the Super Bowl, an ending. We tune into the season finale or series finale of our favorite shows.  We’re excited about the beginning of a particular season, and we have bittersweet feelings at its conclusion – yet we also cherish the memories and lessons of the experience. We rejoice when babies are born, and when someone dies, we honor their memory at least one more time as we grieve. These are all beautiful things.

I suspect my own admiration for beginnings and endings could be why I gravitated toward education as a career. It’s certainly something I enjoyed about it. The first day of school is exciting. The last day of school, even more so. Everybody is happy on graduation day. Surely one of the greatest things about a school year is that it begins and ends, and the rhythm of that process is fulfilling. I also think, for a lot of people, the never-ending quality of a job outside of education is one of the things that makes it awful. Some jobs never seem to have an end. And let’s face it, the term “fiscal year,” and the concept of it, is hardly exciting or fulfilling for the average worker.

But the calendar year? You almost have to love it. I do. I love how the end of a given year brings retrospectives – about the events of the past 12 months, the lives that were lost, the lives that began, and the lives that changed, grew, and prospered. For me, 2025 brought significant changes – I’ve already outlined many of those in a previous post. I lost a couple of friends this year – one suddenly, one after an extended illness. But I’ve also met new friends and strengthened connections to old ones. I don’t feel the need to detail everything or offer a lot of personal description. The point of this post is that, for all of us, the chance to close the metaphorical book, the ability to reflect on it all at this time of year is, in a word, wonderful.

Also wonderful? Hope for the coming year. But I’m not necessarily talking about typical New Year’s Resolutions. Too often, those resolutions are outcome based – “I’m going to lose 20 pounds,” “I’m going to make more money,” etc. Outcome-based goals often sound nice, but they’re actually kind of a trap. The truth is that you and I have no idea what outcome we can achieve, nor do we know specifically how we’ll get there, or even if we will. Outcomes are affected by many factors over which we have zero control. I found outcome-driven goals to be a complete waste of time in my education career because of the lack of control over the student population. Outcomes are every bit as useless when developing New Year’s Resolutions. 

But what is useful in setting goals is the practice of deciding to adjust that which we can control. In deciding New Year’s Resolutions, we absolutely know which behaviors we can correct, or at least adjust, going forward. I have a personal, modest list of New Year’s Resolutions. Although I’m not going to delineate those in this space – because you, the reader, probably don’t care that much about what I plan to work on in 2026 – I can definitely say that they will be things over which I have direct influence. And as such, adjusting these behaviors should directly impact me.

What’s the most important aspect of these resolutions? They’re daily. Sure, maybe you want to achieve a certain milestone by the midpoint of the year, June 30, but the real journey to get there begins on January 1. And continues on January 2, January 3, and so on until you finally reach June 30 and beyond. That’s the real challenge – crafting New Year’s Resolutions that allow you to wake up each morning and reiterate, “Today I’m going to…,” and more importantly, do it. It takes patience. It takes time. It takes persistence. Whatever the resolution, it takes the will to avoid whatever behavior you’re leaving behind and replacing it with whatever behavior you seek to pursue, to reinforce, to feed. And what you feed, grows.

The daily nature of effective New Year’s Resolutions is, honestly, what makes them a little ironic, and why so many people establish ineffective resolutions. We experience a huge build-up to the Holiday Season, it culminates with New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, and then we embark on the coming year. And we’ll do it all again in just under 12 months. So it’s natural that the plans we make for each year are grand, not minor and routine. Yet the grandeur is precisely what makes them fruitless. It’s like pretending you can eat a giant meal in just a few minutes, thinking you can read a long book in the next hour, attempting to writing a term paper in one afternoon, or cramming for a final exam when you’ve skipped class all semester. It’s also probably why, in recent years, I lament to my wife that everybody makes a huge deal out of “ringing in the new year,” but they don’t think anything of it when the clock strikes midnight on a random Tuesday in August. Obviously, each new year can feel like a gift, but why don’t we treat each day with the same gratitude?

And yet, despite the irony, I really love the sentiment of closure and renewal that each New Year’s celebration brings. Not because the vast majority of people will make extravagant plans for the coming year that they will abandon before the end of February, but because it serves as an excellent marker in life. That marker is a perfect point for cataloging where the last 365 days went right and wrong, then deciding the daily habits to begin, re-establish, or reinforce for the coming 365 days. Whatever your plans for 2026, I wish you a safe, fun New Year’s Eve, and as The Christmas Waltz says, “May your New Year dreams come true.” Here’s hoping you’re able to persist peacefully and productively in making them happen.

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Festivus 2025 – Commence the Airing of Grievances

Happy Festivus! I’ve previously confessed to being a big Seinfeld fan. If you haven’t seen the episode, you’re looking for Season 9, episode 10, available on Netflix. (Fun fact: this episode includes the great Bryan Cranston and Tracy Letts.) Some may recall that I even created a variant on the holiday called Testivus in my previous role coordinating campus assessment, as described in a previous post. And any proper Seinfeld aficionado will tell you Festivus hasn’t really begun without The Airing of Grievances. I’ve got a lot of problems with you people, and now you’re gonna hear about it!

College Football: I’ll begin with what is perhaps a controversial take, in keeping with the tradition of Festivus: College football in 2025 is stupid. Full disclosure – I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Arlington, which cancelled their football program literally the year before I enrolled. I was drum major of UTA’s band during its initial years without football, and we didn’t miss the sport one bit, mainly because UTA football, despite producing some quality players who had productive NFL careers, was collectively mired in mediocrity for nearly two decades prior to its cancellation in 1985. So I will allow that my perspective is biased, and I completely understand when people who attend or have attended other schools tell me stories about how fun it is/was to attend football games on Saturdays. And I’ve observed video evidence of many cool traditions at a variety of schools. So despite my background and bias, I get that college football can be a very cool experience, as it should be. I wish it was so simple, and I congratulate schools like the University of North Texas, where it is, for the most part.

But as with many cool phenomena in this world, there’s a line that can be crossed, and when it is, the cool factor is ruined. College football, as an institution, has crossed that line, maybe even obliterated it. The primary impetus is money. The primary evidence of this is seen across the sport – NIL, the transfer portal, the College Football Playoff, the bowl system. None of those things are inherently bad. NIL is actually a positive idea in theory, allowing athletes a chance to earn money from their own skills instead of just reserving it for the schools, and NIL works across many sports. The transfer portal (also active in multiple sports) is also a good idea in theory, because the old rule where a transfer had to miss a season was kind of stupid. The College Football Playoff – another great idea in theory. The bowl system was hugely entertaining for years, although the aforementioned developments in the sport have all but killed them.

Honestly, money has corrupted college football for decades. It is no secret that boosters have dropped millions of dollars under-the-table in years past to entice recruits…all in the name of winning. Because a good football team helps your school?!? The rationale escapes me, particularly when the best schools in the USA aren’t football powerhouses. One wonders if those funds could better serve society by actually helping people, but either way, big spending in the name of school pride is nothing new. And it has rightfully led to scandals, although only SMU has ever experienced true justice for its dealings. What’s happened in recent years, though, is comical. Through well-intended measures ostensibly designed to improve the game, college football is headed toward a winner-take-all cliff. NIL and the transfer portal have expanded the financial resources needed just to field a team at all while simultaneously reducing the game to a literal root-for-the-laundry festival of one-and-done rental players. The Playoff, which was supposed to mirror how basketball champions are determined, I suppose, has just led to teams getting upset when they’re left out. They literally take their ball and go home, refusing to play in any bowls. Eventually the lack of entertaining matchups threatens to derail the bowls altogether. The game has essentially become a race to see who can spend the most, on head coaches and players. And those players are basically untouchable on a human level because of the money. The concept of the student-athlete has died. There are people out there who can say they literally attended classes with Earl Campbell or Joe Montana. Not anymore. College football has long been the proverbial minor league for the NFL, but now it carries NFL-level financial commitments and NFL-level boundaries. Literal teenagers are making pro-level money, given to them by loosely regulated groups – no franchises, no true governing body, no commissioner. No one actually looking out for the good and integrity of the game. And certainly no one pondering the consequences of handing that much money to a kid who just turned old enough to vote or perhaps to purchase alcohol.

In the meantime, college football fans have arguably become the worst part of the institution. They rush to defend every single action of their highly-paid players, no matter how indefensible. “Sure, he’s an a**hole, but he’s our a**hole” is not the argument you think it is. Nor is “everybody does it.” Shame has died. Fans expect nothing of their team’s players as people. They don’t care about what will happen to these guys after football at all. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that those players will only be around this season. Fans also desperately seek excuses for including their team in the playoff, or for their team refusing to play in a bowl. They don’t really love the game; they don’t even truly love their team. They care only about their team winning, not how, even if it’s to the detriment of the game. Even if it’s to the detriment of the school whose students pay fees to help underwrite the program. That kind of attitude will eventually, ultimately, lead to the demise of the sport. If college football truly is a fun, tradition-filled good time on a Saturday afternoon, then it’s time the fandom stop worrying so much about polls and committees, and just enjoy the experience. Support the team, win or lose, and be honest with yourselves about your team, its players, and where all of this should fit in your lives.

Obsession with Politics: Speaking of attitude ultimately leading to demise, next on my list of grievances is politics – specifically, obsession with politics. And granted, this topic could turn into a screed about a consummate narcissist who seeks to make everything about him, but I don’t want to talk about a**holes. Griping about a**holes is like complaining about bad weather – it’s (they’re) always going to be there, so the best response is honestly to just put on a coat, carry an umbrella, or otherwise take measures to cope with it (them) and get on with your life. And frankly, I don’t even want to talk about the media’s obsession with a specific a**hole, allowing him to dominate the news cycle with his narcissism and grift. Maybe another time.

No, I’m talking about someone you know…maybe someone you know well. Could be a relative. Could be a friend. This person is constantly obsessed with a political ideology, party, figure, or narrative, much like the worst college football fan is constantly obsessed with their team’s record or stats. Moreover, this person views literally everything in life through an imaginary litmus test born of that political obsession. They don’t want to watch that particular TV show because it has that actor who offended their political sensibilities 20 years ago. They won’t listen to that music because that singer said something mean about “their president” at some point. They won’t eat that food because some ingredient is primarily produced in some nation whose prime minister doesn’t like their favorite politician or share their political viewpoint. They announce to the world that they hereby refuse to visit this city or that state because they’ve elected a particular person or approved a particular policy. They view themselves as constantly under attack – because they’re Christian, because they’re not Christian, because they’re a Republican, because they’re a Democrat, because they work in [insert industry name here], because they’re part of some minority, because they’re a bald white overweight incel, because…, because…, because… And since they’re constantly under attack, they are constantly a victim of…something. And because they are constantly a victim, there’s always something dramatic to address, to discuss, to obsess over, centered solely on their politics. It is exhausting, much like it’s exhausting to hear a college football fan gripe about how the refs hate their team, or the committee hates their school, or how horrible the players from that other team are, and on and on.

And you know what ought to be exhausting? Living your life against a perpetual political backdrop. Pulling out your proverbial litmus test for EVERYTHING. Living life this way makes it impossible to enjoy anything, and for the people truly in your life, it makes it impossible for them to enjoy being around you. You can’t just watch TV or listen to music. You can’t even go to church, lest the priest or preacher say something that offends your political sensibilities. You can’t just have a conversation and be happy that a college student enjoys a class. No, you’ve got to wonder how the class is “indoctrinating” the student. You’ve got to wonder whether the singer supports “your guy.” You watch that movie and complain that the hero(es) were or were not from a particular demographic. You’ve got to assume that somehow this president or that congressman has somehow harmed your life this week, this month, this year. You’ve got to decide if this religious figure, or pop cultural personality, or even family member in front of you shows appropriate fealty to your political icon or ideology. Politics is your religion, and that’s just sad.

If you’re reading the last two paragraphs and nodding your head with someone’s face and demeanor in your head, a word of advice: Let them go. Cut ties. Walk away. Maybe you can’t do it immediately, cold-turkey-style. But you have to get away from it. I know I do, and I am. Life is too short to be forced into vicarious drama driven by someone else’s obsession with their own political fantasies as they offer fealty to people who care not one bit about them or to ideology that is counter to what they need or desire. Sometime I will write a post about the absurdity of politics, but the bottom line is that government is a means to an end, political ideology is mostly nonsense, and none of it should dominate your life.

Terrible Social Media: And speaking of “vicarious drama,” I’ve got news for you about your social media feed – it is every bit as terrible as you think it is, unless you’ve worked hard to prune it and cultivate the content you actually desire to see. Why is it so bad? Because social media, as opposed to traditional media, has basically no barrier to entry. In the golden age of traditional media – we’re talking the days of only 3-5 TV channels and robust terrestrial radio on both AM and FM – content was vetted. Granted, there was a particular profile to the powerbrokers vetting that content, but still. Someone actually took the time to say “This can go on TV/radio; this cannot.” Granted further, not all of the people and content that actually made it to air were high-quality, but the vast majority that got airtime was better than what didn’t. Easily.

The proliferation of cable TV loosened the restrictions on what aired, but there still were, and are, people who vet the content. Journalism has suffered severely from this development because 24-hour news on cable means that so-called “news outlets” are constantly looking to fill airtime, and they’ve resorted to less-than-stellar methods. Giants like Walter Cronkite, Frank Reynolds, and Barbara Walters have given way to hacks that used to be relegated to syndicated late-night shows like A Current Affair. That’s what typically happens when the pool expands. More teams in a league dilutes the talent a bit, so players who might not really deserve to see the field end up playing. Sometimes the talent pool improves or reveals untapped sources that are worthwhile. Sometimes content rises to the occasion – after all, cable networks gave us The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Homeland. Streaming services have given us Ted Lasso, Stranger Things, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Severance. All was not lost with the advent of cable, because someone was still attempting to filter out the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

What has social media content given us? Chaff, and lots of it. Reaction videos. Videos claiming to show “the greatest {fill-in-blank] of all time” featuring something that occurred last week. Guys trying to explain movies from years ago that everyone’s already seen and understand. (Seriously, who on this planet needed to see a YouTube video breaking down the “Lone Pine Mall” joke from Back to the Future? Is anyone watching this movie that clueless?) People desperately seeking attention as influencers, and frankly, hopeful that they can earn a spot in legitimate, vetted media by getting noticed on a social media platform. Usually, they’re pretenders. Wannabes. Or maybe they seek to emulate Mr. Beast by generating more extravagant stuff that is still every bit as banal – but hey, they’ve maximized their revenue using the algorithm, so who cares what it is as long as it gets attention? Eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. Subscribers. Views. Clicks. Feeding a financial bottom line, regardless of quality. Welcome to the 21st century. Yes, you can find some entertaining content from the likes of The Holderness Family and certain others, and occasionally there is a proverbial diamond-in-the-rough that might develop into something bigger, but the content you’ll find on social media is, for the most part…exactly what you should expect in a free, unvetted, unregulated environment. All the more reason to get annoyed when YouTube throws an ad in the middle of a video that is as awful as you suspect it is.

And yet, WE are the problem, because the algorithm will continue to feed us stuff when we click on it and linger for more than a few seconds. Sadly, watching someone cook sh**ty spaghetti on her kitchen counter using several jars of Ragu, even if you only stayed there to wonder WTF was happening, will only lead you to receive more videos like this over time. You and me – WE have to show discipline, move away, avoid clicking. It actually takes some work to show such restraint, to build and curate a feed that delivers, if not fulfilling content, at least content that isn’t excretory. The algorithm will feed you what you consume, so it’s up to you to fight the urge to consume junk content and focus on things that are actually appealing.

And that really is the key: with just about all Festivus Grievances, it comes down to one person – the one in the mirror. As much fun as it is to quote the great Jerry Stiller, issues complaints about the world, and act cantankerous at this time of year, when there seems to be so much to do in so little time, the irony of Festivus is that, at its core, it really is a response to how much society has twisted the Christmas season. The sentiment of the holiday fits the mindset of Seinfeld, which sought out comedy in shallow, self-absorbed people who were generally oblivious to the consequences of their actions. Yet instead, three decades later it seems like some people actually celebrate this shallowness and look at Seinfeld characters as a blueprint for how to live their lives. Elaine Benes famously and hilariously asked, “Is it possible I’m not as attractive as I think I am?” It was a subtle and brilliant commentary on her character, one that is lost way too often on all of us in this day and age. People don’t perceive the irony because they aren’t honest with themselves. This Festivus, maybe we should look inward, air our grievances to the mirror, and figure out over the next eight days how we’re going to resolve them in the coming year. Happy Festivus to all!

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Little Things That Matter

Next Tuesday 12/23 will be Festivus 2025 for those who celebrate, and as a longtime Seinfeld fan with a blog, I will definitely be engaging in the Airing of Grievances that day. But lest I seem like a typical curmudgeon who does nothing but grouse and complain in my blog, I want to use the space this week to express appreciation for lots of little things in the world. It’s not really a personal gratitude post like I made at Thanksgiving; this post is devoted to random good things I observe at times (and yes, I do manage to notice lots of cool things at least as much as I perceive idiocy). And it’s designed to acknowledge the benefit of such things.

Some of the items in this post may, no doubt, elicit cynical and/or negatives responses from some readers. That says more about the reader’s experience than anything else. Remember that I’m writing from the perspective of my own experience, mainly over the past year, but often over the course of several years. So if your experience is different, feel free to address it in your own Festivus Grievances next week.

Let’s dive right in—

Supportive Parents of School-Age Children: This thought actually originated in the fall when I was announcing marching band shows and witnessing multitudes of parents assisting in the parking lot and on the field. A typical marching band production costing thousands of dollars and involving hundreds of students could not happen without the service of these parents, and I wanted to acknowledge that. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that in every aspect of education, supportive parents are crucial. Much like with problem students, educators often end up devoting way too much time to dealing with problem parents – the ones who complain to the coach that their child isn’t playing enough, isn’t first chair, doesn’t make 100s on every assignment…you know the type. It’s time we acknowledge that we see the supportive parents, and we appreciate them. The parents who work with their children to reinforce good behaviors, to improve academic habits, and to practice more. The parents who always bring their children early to school and to events, and who are there on-time ready to take them home at the end. The parents who attend every game, every show, every performance, every concert, not to complain to the refs or the coaches, not to criticize the performance, but to cheer their child’s team, win or lose, to applaud the performance regardless of minor mistakes. The parents who take care of other children who need it. The parents who devote their time and energy to this school or this program because their child loves participating, and they want to help make it a good experience. These parents need to be seen and credited, and even though they can never be shown enough appreciation, they must know that there are countless teachers, coaches, directors, and other adults who value them.

City Services: I live in Arlington, Texas, and have since 1971. The city’s population has more than quadrupled in my lifetime. As much as people will recognize my hometown as the home of the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers, or the home of Six Flags Over Texas, or the “Entertainment Capital of Texas,” or “The American Dream City,” there are factions that criticize Arlington for being too big now, or for not having enough culture, or a variety of other perceived shortcomings. And I have personally experienced times when I have been unhappy with street conditions and other aspects of the city. But in the end, what I’ve grown to appreciate about Arlington are the multitude of city services available here that are top-notch. For one, this city has an amazing selection of parks. I’ve become an avid walker and runner – typically 2+ miles of one or the other each morning – and I am fortunate that this city has at least a half-dozen parks accessible to me with excellent trails to pursue, all within a 10-minute drive from my house. Additionally, although we haven’t needed them this year (thankfully), we have had need of the Arlington Police and Fire Departments in years past, and they have also been amazing in our experience. My oldest son, who has autism, has a job for which he needs transportation, and we’re able to use Arlington’s Handitran service for him on roughly 95% of his work days. It’s safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation for him. We’re grateful that it easily allows him to get to work, and it also gives him a level of independence rather than relying on his parents all the time. Speaking of transportation, I had occasion to ride the Trinity Railway Express into downtown Dallas recently for a voiceover event. TRE connects to the DART railway system in Dallas, and again – safe, reliable, cost-effective transportation. The one thing I still wonder about with Arlington is why we don’t have public transportation, and why we haven’t gotten connected to DART. It seems rather short-sighted to me that Arlington voters have denied access to service like this in the past, and I’m frankly disappointed that there are municipalities to the east who are actually considering abandoning DART. As someone who loves to visit New York, and who has no problem navigating that area’s subways and trains, I find the reliance on constant automobile transportation in Dallas-Fort Worth to be exhausting at times. So I would hope that any suburbs that break from DART pursue a different option. And I think it’s worth pursuing light rail as a city or even statewide service instead of just building another tollroad. Either way, I think Arlington’s city services are worth acknowledging, and I appreciate them daily.

Competent, Courteous Drivers: Because of the lack of public transportation options in my area, I find myself driving most of the time, as do most of the residents of the DFW area (and most of Texas, for that matter). And while it is proverbial low-hanging fruit to complain about clueless drivers (I will include a very specific grievance next week) all the time, I want to acknowledge the competent, courteous drivers, instead, in this space today. And I think there are actually more of them out there than we think. Again, we devote our energy to the problems without appreciating the level of quality actually on the road. Another recent experience: I also had to travel to downtown Dallas twice by car recently, and both times, I exited the city via the Woodall Rogers Freeway to I-35E. Anyone familiar with that area knows that the right lane entering the freeway also serves as the exit for traffic headed from I-35E to the Dallas North Tollway. So there’s a stretch of road with lots of merging – drivers like me moving one lane to the left while other drivers move one lane to the right. Let me tell you this: few things on any road are better than a dependable merging experience, where drivers are signaling, paying attention, matching speeds, and switching lanes simultaneously so that each gets where they need to be smoothly and safely. I experienced this on two consecutive days in Dallas, and both times, I waved to the drivers switching places with me to thank them. I hope they saw and appreciated this little thing as much as I did. I experience this frequently on I-20 in Arlington, as well, between Cooper St and Matlock Rd. There are far more courteous, competent drivers in those areas than there are bad ones. Sure, the bad ones going too fast and using lots of lanes draw our attention, but the good drivers need to greet each other more in solidarity. We need less honking, yelling, road rage, and all that entails on the road. We need more positive communication among the drivers for jobs well-done. Texas still has signs that say “Drive Friendly,” and we really should take more time to wave and acknowledge each other when drivers are doing things correctly.

Healthcare Professionals: I think this topic grows nearer and dearer to me as I age, but this year has been especially active for us when it comes to healthcare. I’ve already indicated the reasons why in my Thanksgiving post, and I also credited our excellent primary care physician. My wife worked with a host of healthcare professionals during her scans, biopsy, and surgery. I worked with several healthcare workers, as well. I had my first colonoscopy this fall. I realize that A) it means I’m old, and B) I probably should have had at least my second one by 57 years old. But I’m a bonafide coward who had put off the procedure, and I was quite nervous about it when the time came. Yet everyone I worked with through the process was patient and professional with me, compassionate about my trepidation and doing their best to assuage my fears. We’ve also worked with healthcare professionals who care for my mother, now 95 years old and living in hospice care in an assisted living facility. They care for her with an impressive level of integrity and grace. What I realize pondering all these experiences is just how exceptional everyone we’ve encountered has been. I’m talking every single individual – office staff, physician’s assistants, nurses, anesthesiologists, and of course, physicians…every one of these people we saw this year was terrific. Not once did we come across someone who seemed ornery, incompetent, flustered, frustrated, clueless, or even anxious. Anytime we dealt with healthcare professionals, it was clear that these people were, in fact, professionals. In retrospect, it was both astonishing and gratifying. At the same time, I’m frustrated for these people because we all know that the healthcare system in the US is, if not broken, then deeply flawed. Yet these workers continue to give excellent care within the confines of that system. That reflects a personal commitment that deserves a salute.

Event Planners: You might think, given how each of the previous items in this post seemed to imply a certain nobility, that this item seems odd. But hear me out on this. It’s easy to read the phrase “event planner” and conjure some type of pop cultural image, where the person involved is making massive sums of money managing lavish soirées. You know…the person wearing a headset to communicate with all the people under their charge as they give orders…in a movie, this person is typically a self-absorbed jerk, or the central character who’s too overworked and in need of some significant other to give life meaning, or perhaps even the comic relief. Maybe such people exist in the world, but the reality most of the time is that you’ve experienced the work of an event planner you’ve never seen, heard, or known. That person – a real person – earns a modest, nominal amount of money for the work, if any at all. Often, they’re either planning the event as an additional duty to their main job, or as a volunteer. And the goal of that individual is to craft and coordinate the best event possible for you as a member of a community. A show, a concert, a contest, a prom, a tournament, a spelling bee, a parade, a carnival, an athletic event, an awards program, a graduation. Someone is in charge of that event, trying to ensure that everyone involved knows what to do and actually does it when and how they’re supposed to. I often have the privilege of working with these people, because they need me to speak into a microphone at an appointed time to read a script, say a name, or deliver a message. I’ve talked in a previous post about how much I love contributing to a team in that role, but I also want to highlight here that we should all take opportunities to reflect on and appreciate the contributions of these people “in charge.” The vast majority are not doing it for large amounts of money; they’re doing it out of love for and commitment to the activity at hand and its participants. We, as citizens, community members, parents, family, and friends, desire to have memorable experiences for ourselves and our families, and that makes this work critical. Someone has to do it, and we should be appreciative of the people who step up and do.

Service Workers of all Types: Speaking of “someone has to do it,” let’s conclude by talking about service workers. My son, who I mentioned earlier, is one such worker. He’s one of thousands of workers in school cafeterias. For him, the work is stable and predictable, which is important for the nature of his autism; he craves routine. But from a broader perspective, I am quite proud of the work he does because anyone who’s spent time working in a school likely has an appreciation for all the work that goes into feeding the student population day-in and day-out. My own grandmother spent her career as a manager of a school cafeteria. Society often finds it easy to rag on the school lunch as something lame, but the truth is that it is extraordinary how well the system works. Heck, the general work involved in feeding the entire population of this planet, whether you’re talking about farming and ranching, fisheries, grocery stores, restaurants, food pantries, or anything else, is just this side of a miracle. And most of the people involved provide a service. And yet, for some reason American society so often looks down on them. Why? Why is it considered acceptable by some to denigrate the local barista or even the guy grilling burgers or making fries? Is it really OK to be awful to your server because the kitchen is slow? Is it acceptable to cuss out the fast food worker because they added mayo when you asked for none? Is it fathomable to look down on someone pouring your coffee when you work in an office job? Every single one of these people is a human being worthy of respect and dignity. The person changing your oil, rotating your tires, repairing your sink, replacing parts on your garage door, fixing the air conditioner, making your latte, cooking your food, bringing your food to the table, taking your garbage and recycling from your home, changing the sheets on your hotel bed, moving your baggage on and off the plane, serving your beer and hot dog. Humans. Every. Single. One. I don’t intend to get on a soapbox about living wages for all these people, but let’s at least commit to seeing them, recognizing their humanity, and showing some basic decency and respect.

The bottom line, in this post that preemptively seeks to counter the negative, albeit comedic, sentiments of Festivus, is that life is ultimately about trying to become a better person each day. Why bother getting up each morning if you’re not trying to become the best version of yourself? I think that’s why a different show, Ted Lasso, resonates so much with so many people, especially in this day and age. The central message of the show has always been to seek out the best version of us, to work constantly toward better. As someone who is acutely aware of the reality that I’m getting older and not, in fact, going to live forever, it’s all I really want now. I’m still going to have days when I falter in the quest to be a better person than I was yesterday, or last year, or last decade, or when I was only 30. But I’m still going to try. And particularly in this day and age, I think an important step in that direction is looking around and noticing the good things in this world. The little things. Noticing, acknowledging, and celebrating them.

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The Least Wonderful Time of the Year

No, this post is NOT about to be 2,600+ words bashing the Christmas season for being too commercialized or sappy or anything else. I’m actually loving the holiday season this year. Anyone who’s read this blog before probably knows why.

What this post IS about is STAAR Testing – specifically, STAAR End-Of-Course (EOC) Retests for those high school students who are cursed with the requirement of taking them. I will also share a personal story about what I now believe was proverbial “Testing Hades,” and how I helped get my staff (and myself) through it using humor.

I have previously confessed on this blog that the final dozen years of my K-12 education career had me wrestling with self-loathing because, as a so-called “assessment professional,” my biggest role was training, implementation, and support of a system that is deeply flawed at best. There are a host of reasons for these flaws, many of which would involve exposition that would truly be agonizing to read. What it comes down to is primarily inconsistency.

STAAR is fundamentally inconsistent as a matter of course because everything about its construction is constantly changing. The state curriculum of Texas public schools, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) is regularly revised. Subject area TEKS are reviewed and adjusted at least once every 10 years on a rotating basis. Schools don’t have to contend with full-scale revisions all at once, but teachers of a given subject know that they will have to adjust planning and teaching within a decade at minimum. While a decade doesn’t seem frequent on its face, the reality in a classroom is that it may take several years after revisions are published to determine the best way to approach certain TEKS standards instructionally. It’s not like anyone can just flip a switch, make a couple of tweaks, and all students magically respond positively to whatever the new TEKS are.

And as you might expect, the process of assessing any new TEKS learning standards can also be messy and flawed over several years. This is why TEA randomly selects districts and campuses for specific field tests every year, usually in February. A typical TEA Field Test is similar to an actual STAAR test, and campuses are required to implement them with the same approach and security protocols that they use for the actual STAAR test in the spring, except there’s no payoff for a field test. Whether students do well or poorly, they will never be rewarded or punished. They will never even know how they scored. Reporting of results is minimal, because the point is literally to test the test items themselves and determine if they’re reliable and valid. If you’re thinking that your children might become lab experiments each February so that psychometricians can analyze results, you would be correct.

This process is also why actual STAAR tests in the spring include “field test items” that may or may not actually be scored. And it’s why TEA will rewrite and revise items continually between STAAR testing cycles, which occur annually each April for Grades 3-8, but every April, June, and December for high school students. There’s a continual item analysis process to seek out a reliable and valid test, and as you might expect, some STAAR tests are more reliable and valid than others. Small comfort to a high school freshman who learns he has to retake an EOC even if the test itself was poorly constructed.

The revision process, combined with the desire of schools to “teach to the test” so that scores improve has created its own cottage industry. A legion of consulting companies have developed with intent of helping schools and their teachers to analyze released items from STAAR tests, connect those items to the TEKS standards being assessed, and determine ways to adjust instruction so that the teachers may better prepare students for what they might see on the STAAR. Is it good instruction? Sometimes. Your mileage may vary, as they say. But “teach to the test” has become scientific (or pseudo-scientific, in many cases), all in the name of accountability points, property values…and, oh yeah, “for the children.”

Speaking of those children – we all want them to excel, right? We want them to score well since it’s evidence that they’re learning, it’s good for self-esteem, yada, yada, yada. But of course, it’s not always so simple. Remember that this is a test that students will see only once per year. (Theoretically three times with upcoming legislative changes.) And when they see the test next year, it’ll be a bit different from last year because Grade 8 is different from Grade 7, which is different from Grade 6, and so on, even if the subject is still Reading or Math. It is no wonder that most schools see drops in Math scores, for instance, from Grade 4 to Grade 5, year after year, even as students change, because Grade 5 Math is typically a bit more challenging than Grade 4 Math. What’s more, the actual passing standard might be adjusted thanks to the magic of the “cut score.”

When you visit TEA’s website, you might run across the STAAR Performance Standards for Grades 3-8 and EOC. You’ll see austere tables listing the Scale Scores required for a given student to reach Approaches, Meets, or Masters Grade Level performance categories as handed down by the gods themselves…er, I mean, by TEA officials. These categories and scale scores are unchanged (thanks to the auspices of either Odin or Ra; I never remember which), but the real sausage is made after students have completed the tests, psychometricians have analyzed the results, and TEA constructs what’s known as a Raw Score Conversion Table. Take Grade 5 Math, for instance, which had 42 items that were scored in 2025. TEA takes every student raw score, from 1 to 42, and links it to a given Scale Score. Those links then determine what raw score a student needed to reach the Approaches / Meets / Masters level from the Performance Standards. It’s all computed AFTER THE FACT, because TEA looks at the distribution of student raw scores statewide before deciding where, in fact, “passing” will be located. In 2025, a Grade 5 student in Math needed to get 17 of 42 items correct for Approaches, 26 for Meets, and 34 for Masters. In 2026 and beyond, those raw scores could change depending on how every student in Texas fared on that year’s test. It’s a moving target every year. It might not move much, but it can move. Is it possible that public relations and political concerns can impact where the cut scores fall? You tell me. It was certainly curious that accountability ratings in 2023 and 2024 went to court, then in 2025 most districts and campuses in the state saw their STAAR scores and ratings increase. I don’t have the time or inclination to lay out a full analysis of the data over those years, but it sure was a curious coincidence.

The bottom line is that passing standards can be, and are, adjusted year-to-year as cut scores are linked to scale scores. “Passing the STAAR” is, itself, an exercise in inconsistency. What’s more, “passing” isn’t always the end for students in high school. Current TEA guidelines require students to reach Approaches Grade Level or higher in all 5 EOC-assessed subjects – English I, English II, Algebra I, Biology, and US History. (I won’t open the Individual Graduation Committee or the Substitute Assessment cans of worms; those are other deep-dive posts.) The students currently taking December EOCs are those who have previously not passed one or more tests, or who were Absent or otherwise missed their opportunities in April and June. When a student finally achieves those scores and passes their classes, graduation is on the horizon. Perhaps college? Not so fast. “Approaches Grade Level” is passing for graduation purposes only. TEA has a whole other set of standards for what is called “College, Career, and Military Readiness” (CCMR). And Approaches on STAAR EOC ain’t one of them. In fact, STAAR scores don’t matter AT ALL for CCMR accountability standards, and they won’t grant students access to Texas public colleges and universities…at least, not without some type of remedial learning. So now, high schools in Texas offer the TSIA2, SAT, and ACT at least once to all their students in an attempt to get as many students as possible to meet CCMR requirements. More testing for our high schoolers! Isn’t it grand? In fact, it’s several grand paid each year by the taxpayers, or by the students themselves.

Lest you think we only torture the high schools and their students, there’s a whole set of other accountability measurements that primarily impact elementary, intermediate, and middle schools and their students – the Progress Measure, brought to you by TEA through each year’s STAAR tests. The intent is actually well-meaning and fairly intuitive: Students should show growth, also called academic progress, in their year-to-year performance on STAAR Reading and Math tests. Easy, right? Of course not! You might think that an intuitive approach to growth would be that a given student should score at or higher than the previous year’s raw or scale score to show progress. Or perhaps there should be a set of score ranges that might overlap so that students wouldn’t be penalized for missing one more item than last year. But you would be wrong in both cases. Instead, TEA determines progress based on the student’s performance among the Approaches / Meets / Masters standards, which we’ve already established may change thanks to cut scores. Essentially, in order for a student to “meet progress” officially, that student must match or exceed the performance category from the previous year. If they reached Approaches last year, they must reach Approaches, Meets, or Masters this year. Here’s the problem: because those performance levels are matched directly to a specific raw score, it’s possible for a student to “not meet growth” based on a single test item. Consider the Grade 5 Math scores referenced earlier, and suppose a 5th grader in 2025 got 34 of 42 items correct in 2025 to reach Masters Grade Level. It just so happens that in 2025, Masters on Grade 6 Math also required a raw score of 34 out of 43 items. BUT, in 2026, IF the Masters Level ends up being raised to 35 items after TEA’s psychometric analysis, AND this same student gets the same raw score, 34 on Grade 6 Math, the student will actually DROP to Meets Grade Level. That might seem fine, BUT this student will be deemed “Did Not Meet” for the progress measure in Math. By a single item. Even though the student passed the test easily, getting 79% of the items correct when it only takes 37% to “pass.” Is this equitable, fair, justifiable, reliable, and/or valid? You tell me.

Knowledge of such flaws and inequities are just some of the reasons that it became more and more difficult for me to justify continuing to work as an “assessment professional.” It became increasingly difficult to pretend that the system was defensible, let alone worth training teachers how to implement it appropriately. Of course, when it came to the insanity of the system, Grand Prairie ISD said “hold my beer” and added layers of local assessment to this Least Wonderful Time of Year. So began the creation of Testivus.

Here’s how it happened: The high school calendar in GPISD had students attending classes for roughly 3 weeks after Thanksgiving break. Week 1 was mostly instruction; TEA allowed districts to offer December EOCs that week, but GPISD elected to wait. Week 2 was when GPISD offered December EOCs over four days (Tuesday through Friday because TEA at the time did not allow STAAR tests on Mondays). But GPISD also added four (4!!!) additional days of local assessments – “Q2 Summative Assessments,” they were called – and required “shutdown” testing for EOC-assessed courses. What’s more, the US History Q2 Summative HAD to be given on the Friday of Week 3 because of district policy on semester exams, meaning we had to hold both the final day of EOCs AND a major local assessment on the same day. On a Friday, no less. Self-induced torture. Or should I say, district-induced torture. Somewhere in those 8 days, non-core subjects also had to offer Semester 1 Exams. As you might imagine, the schedule was somewhere between confusing and downright comical. As an administrator, it was a death-defying juggling act just to create a coherent schedule, and then we had to communicate it to the staff and students. So I had a choice: either tear out my hair, elevate my blood pressure, and otherwise stress myself out at the holidays trying to make it work, or have fun with it. I decided to have fun and approach it with humor. So Testivus was born.

Testivus, as any good Seinfeld fan would infer, was a riff on Festivus, the fictional holiday “for the rest of us” in response to the rampant commercialism of Christmas. We needed something bizarre to associate with, and yes, resist, the madness, because there was no way to comprehend it without also admitting it was strange and convoluted. I even created a logo for it that I included on documents I gave to the teachers. I made jokes about it in e-mail communication. I was also brutally honest. “This is what happens when district tries to shoehorn more than 8 tests into 8 days. You might argue it’s the counterpoint to the miracle of Hanukkah.” Eventually, my humor got me in mild trouble. It just so happened that the husband of the district’s head of data and accountability worked as the chief security officer on our campus, and he received the mass e-mails I sent to the staff. He would forward said e-mails to his wife. But rather than contact me herself, she asked the district testing coordinator (DTC) to call and badger me about my humor. It so happens that the DTC’s personality is often quite dramatic, dialing any little issue up to 11 (shout-out to Nigel Tufnel) immediately. So I was told, “Senior district administrators are reading your e-mails, and they are not amused. I guess you’re trying to be funny, but to them it sounds like you’re pitting your campus in opposition to the district.” Fine, whatever. I expressed regret to her that she was being asked to deal with it, but the reality was that district was pitting itself against campuses by inundating us with local assessments literally layered on top of state assessments. I make no apologies for calling that out, nor would I apologize for fostering some empathy and camaraderie with my campus colleagues through humor that they genuinely enjoyed. And you know what? In Fall 2025, Grand Prairie ISD nixed those plans, removed “Q2 Summative Assessments” from the calendar entirely, and instead created “Fall District Assessments” on a different week in November. Granted, they still managed to make it awkward (not worth outlining how here), but they changed their approach to local assessments. Maybe the actual message behind Testivus, and my humor, resonated with someone, after all.

So if you’re winding your way through a similar situation, navigating the nonsense passed down from someone who doesn’t realize the negative impact on your students and teachers, I wish you a Happy Testivus. Hang in there, do the best you can under the circumstances, and most of all, laugh about the laughable. Go ahead and roll your eyes at the outlandish. Give yourself permission to have fun with it instead of getting upset. And most of all, realize that none of these things…zero, nada, nenhum, nüt…will matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Treat your students and your colleagues with dignity, empathy, and kindness in this most blessed of holiday seasons, and let the absurd wallow in its absurdity.

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In Praise of Teamwork

This post, surprisingly enough, connects strongly to voiceover. Back when I started this blog in August, I intentionally and specifically stated that this is not a voiceover blog. And my posts thus far have borne out this statement. Most of them have focused on observations related on some level to my teaching career, including notes about leadership, assessment, and presentation skills. I’ve also posted on topics pertaining to my experiences in band. Naturally, I’ve mentioned my retirement from K-12 public education several times since that’s something that has dominated my life since the end of June, and it’s a major reason why I actually have time for this blog and for my voiceover career.

That career is progressing as we speak. I’ve established some leads, gotten a handful of auditions, and even booked a few jobs. I’m not where I intend to be, but every journey begins with its first steps, as they say. And what I’ve learned along those few steps is a critical lesson – one that I’ve realized applied in my education career far more than I expected, and one that I think applies to voiceover more than many of us appreciate. That lesson is the importance of teamwork – how the individual contributes to the team and how effective teamwork actually helps the individual. It’s an underrated lesson for my friends and colleagues in the voiceover industry.

Back when I began my education career, I didn’t exactly anticipate that teamwork would be terribly important. It wasn’t a clear priority in my education coursework at the collegiate level. We participated in cooperative learning, and we were coached how to use it effectively, but I don’t recall explicit instruction on the importance of teamwork within the profession as a matter of course. It was a more general “collaborate with your colleagues” theme. The trend of Professional Learning Communities (PLC) in education was not in vogue at the time. And if I’m being honest, my so-called “mentor teacher” during my first year was somewhere between ineffective and a total waste. I was teaching government that first year, and all I got from him was literally a printout of his “lesson plans” for the class (dot-matrix printout, no less), which was what he provided for administration but not nearly what he used for his actual class. I suppose it was a start, but it was hardly helpful and certainly not comprehensive. He would occasionally throw me the bone of an odd handout now and then. But this was hardly teamwork, and I was hardly a teammate. This type of thing went on for roughly three years, and I felt nearly alone as a teacher during that time. For three years, I figured things out for myself. Then I was moved to World Geography at what was then the “9th Grade Center,” where I spent two years, and my perspective changed dramatically. World Geography teachers operated as a true team. There were projects that all the teachers assigned. There was collaboration. I was actually valued as a colleague, and I was free to offer my own ideas and create activities to share with my peers just as much as I could borrow and absorb from them.

Those two years altered the trajectory of my teaching career. After three years feeling like a solitary soul marooned on an island, I experienced two incredible years as a valued member of a viable team. When I returned to the senior level teaching government and economics (the old “mentor” had retired), I was assertive and proactive in establishing teamwork, collaborated more, and genuinely improved as an instructor. It helped that there was some turnover in the staff, and the newer teachers were also more willing to engage with each other. And I believe the process helped all of us excel, not just as subject-area teams, but also as a department. By the time I had advanced to teaching AP Macroeconomics, I had established strong rapport with my colleagues who taught AP US Government. We taught these students on an A/B schedule, so they alternated these classes daily, and we as instructors worked so that our teaching connected with each other’s, reinforcing what students were learning in both classes. The result was better learning for all of those AP students in both courses. It was educational teamwork at some of the highest level I ever experienced.

As my career in education continued, the benefits of teamwork were consistently apparent, especially when I worked in central administration. We had a small department in Research & Assessment, but the tasks each of us worked on connected well enough that our team was always moving forward impressively for the district. All in all, I think I experienced a solid 22 straight years of effective teamwork. The actual level of effectiveness varied at times, but it was always there, and I probably took it for granted. Then I left Mansfield ISD for what I thought was a better opportunity, and better salary. A higher salary was nice, but it was not a collaborative environment. Teamwork was replaced by top-down micromanagement, headed up by someone who was simply not equipped or ready to lead effectively. She thought she had all the answers, and the other three of us were basically expected to do her bidding, even if she wasn’t clear what that was. I was not valued for the ideas I brought to my job; I was basically expected to read the mind of my supervisor and maintain the status quo in 100% detail. And when I didn’t, when I had the temerity to show initiative and originality, I was diminished and even demeaned. It was a negative environment, plain and simple, bereft of any teamwork.

So when I interviewed for what would become my final position in education, I had one answer for the question, “What do you hope to accomplish in this role?” My response: “I want to become a viable member of a high-functioning team.” I had experienced that feeling, and I had experienced what it was like to lose it and feel like I was expected to be a mindless, boring cog. I just wanted to contribute to a team again. And fortunately, I got that experience again. Yes, there were issues at the district level that ultimately led me to retire from the profession, but I can honestly and definitively say that my time at Grand Prairie High School was a positive experience as part of a high-functioning, well-managed team. I learned so much from my colleagues, and they learned from me. We collaborated on a multitude of projects, and our students benefited. We had each other’s backs. Maybe it’s coincidence, but I believe many of us became lifelong friends, as well. Quite a team, and I will always look back on that place, and so many of those colleagues, fondly.

So what does this have to do with voiceover? It comes down to how we as VO artists see ourselves. There’s a common idea (and joke) in the industry that we’re all a little strange because we spend all day talking to ourselves in a padded room. And it can definitely feel that way. But my own experience has taught me that this idea really isn’t the case. Granted, my background is primarily Live Announce, so I often find myself in an environment where there are people around me. Many of my gigs throughout the year have people in the stands, and on the field or floor, and I’m even in charge of running all the audio at times. I’m also my own roadie for a lot of jobs. And you know what? It’s exhilarating, and I love it.

As I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post, I had the chance to work NCAA Division I college basketball recently – three games so far at the University of Texas at Arlington (which is also my alma mater). And even though PA folks often see ourselves as “the voice above the crowd,” the truth I’ve gleaned from these experiences is that whoever is on PA is not simply in an environment “with other people around.” No, they are…you guessed it…part of a team. The team consists of everyone involved in the game presentation – production director, production assistants, band, cheerleaders, dance team, on-court entertainment, etc. Two hours before tipoff, we go over the run-of-show, which outlines every activity of the day or night, including pregame, timeouts, halftime, and postgame. There are a variety of PA reads, but there are also a multitude of other happenings, and the objective is to time everything out right down to the second whenever possible. The goal is to provide a high-quality game experience for the fans while at the same time recognizing all the sponsors involved with UTA Athletics, and above all, respecting and featuring the game on the floor. It is its own a machine with video, graphics, live music, recorded music, and a true cast of characters, all layered on top of and designed to support the performance of the team. As the PA guy, I am simply one part of the experience. And I will emphasize again, I love it. And it’s really not about my voice, although I truly think my pipes were made to resonate in a stadium or an arena just as much as others’ were made to feature trucks or food or Disney movies. I love being part of the event, fulfilling my role, and adding to the ambience that’s being created. Being a viable part of a high-functioning team.

For my VO friends, that’s something that I think is critical to your, my, and our success as VO professionals, no matter what genre we’re working in. It is way too easy to record an audition or a job listening solely to our own performance. It is way too enticing to get caught up in our own voices. If you want to understand what creative professionals hear – REALLY hear – you have to imagine yourself in the arena, if you will. You have to hear yourself with other aspects of the entire production in mind: the images and/or video that your voice will be used to enhance, the music and other sounds that will be layered with your voice, the objective(s) and goal underlying what the creative team is trying to accomplish. Get out of your own head and away from your own voice. Listen. Take direction. Take a broader perspective, then figure out how your voice fits it and adds to the larger mix. And contribute.

For my education friends, and for anyone else reading this post, “teamwork makes the dream work.” “Be a team player.” “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’” (Although you can’t spell team without an “m” and an “e.”) <Cue groans> Sorry. Just kidding. That all sounds kind of trite and silly, much like most bumper-sticker philosophy. But teamwork really does make you better. If you’re in an educational leadership role, that means you have to involve your team members. Seek their input. Accept their ideas and figure out how to integrate them into the larger plan whenever possible. Don’t micromanage. You don’t have all the answers, nor should you. If you’re in a rank-and-file team member role, step up! Know what your role is, and do your part. Contribute. At the same time, Speak Up! If you have ideas, state them in an organized and appropriate manner.

The bottom line is that, no matter your industry or profession, life isn’t meant to be lived in isolation. Each of us can grow individually, but we advance further by working with each other, sharing ideas and activities, sometimes disagreeing, but ultimately learning and developing as both individuals and a group. In a world that seems to value individualism and “I’m gonna get mine” greed way too much, the benefits of collaboration and cooperation through teamwork have gained importance. It’s a lesson for educators, for voiceover pros, and for society at large.

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Ode to Black Friday

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I am particularly thankful for many things this year, as I posted yesterday. This morning, I resumed my daily ritual of morning walks/runs that I’ve adopted to improve my health. Typically, I head to one of the many lovely parks provided by the City of Arlington, and on my way this morning, I drove by a couple of retailers whose parking lots were populated with more cars than usual for that time of day. And something occurred to me that hadn’t resonated for many years: It’s Black Friday!

No, not the 1869 financial crisis. (He said, knowing most people wouldn’t be aware of any such event.) And not even the term from Philadelphia in the 1950s. (Feel free to look that one up, too.) I speak, of course, of the Day After Thanksgiving, when retailers like to pretend their accounting books go from the red (taking losses) into the black (making profits) thanks to the surge in holiday shopping. Because now that Thanksgiving is over, it’s time to gear up for Christmas. Commence the Christmas shopping.

A little personal history here: I grew up in a household that was very much built on a foundation of paper – books, magazines, and more than one daily newspaper. So I read a lot, although I will freely admit that I was more devoted to the periodicals than I was the books. I suspect it’s the part of me that decided to major in history in college; after all, newspapers and magazines that document what’s happening around us each day will become primary sources of historical knowledge in the future. I just know I preferred them.

Sundays, as it turned out, weren’t just for Mass. They also included the ritual of the Sunday paper. (And we had TWO!) If you recall, the Sunday newspaper in its heyday was packed. There were stories that had been built over the course of the week by the staff, additional features, additional opinions, more reader letters, and of course, ads. Lots and lots of ads, because retailers would publish their specials weekly. Now, as retailers began adopting Black Friday as a positive marketing tactic in the 1980s, the newspaper on Thanksgiving began to grow. Black Friday specials, and hence, more ads. The trend continued into the 1990s, and its growth was fairly organic. The “holiday doorbuster” came about, where a store that normally opened at 10:00am would open as early as 9:00, or even 8:00, or *gasp* 7:00am on the day after Thanksgiving. And they would feature limited-time specials that would expire at or shortly after the normal opening time. The idea, naturally, was to get you into the store earlier than normal, knowing that a given special might draw you, but you would still shop for additional items to get your Christmas shopping done. It was a classic marketing tactic, even if the special itself was a loss leader.

And I will freely admit, I loved it. There was something really cool about checking out the ads in the paper sometime on Thanksgiving Day (for me, usually after food and football), then getting up early on the day after Thanksgiving to shop a little. It was a neat break in the routine that said “It’s the Holidays.” I fondly remember 1996, when I headed to Kay-Bee Toys at The Parks at Arlington with my new sister-in-law so that I could get some cool toys for my niece and nephews on their doorbuster specials. Call me a sucker; I don’t care. I genuinely enjoyed it. I woke up at 6:00am to get to the mall by 7:00am for an 8:00am opening. There were perhaps 50 people waiting outside the store that morning, and everyone was actually very chill about what they wanted. No running, no stampeding, no yelling, no complaining. The employees didn’t seem to mind, either, since they only had to arrive a couple of hours earlier than normal. It was genuinely a fun experience. And these experiences remained fun for several years.

And then they killed it. The opening time kept getting earlier and earlier. Eventually, retailers started opening at midnight. The specials started getting more ridiculous in that they were much cheaper, but severely limited. That really only invites the madness, the running, the stampeding, the fighting, the complaining. The fun of Black Friday dissipated for me. I knew I was definitely done with it the year my in-laws camped out overnight outside Best Buy for the chance at a laptop for $500. A 6:00am wake-up during a holiday is fine, but I’m not sitting awake all night in the cold just to save some money. What’s worse is that the retailers started working with manufacturers to create specific Black Friday merchandise. You were no longer getting a normal item at a remarkable price; you were getting a once-only item that was created cheaply to sell to you cheap. Not the same.

Now, I realize that Frank Costanza created Festivus in 1997 in response to retail madness, and that was during the time when I still enjoyed Black Friday. I will admit that I never worked hard to get the specific hot toy of the year – no Cabbage Patch Kids or Tickle Me Elmo. I suppose that my experience might have been different if I was diving deep into Black Friday shopping instead of just dipping my toes.  I was at Kay-Bee instead of Toys R Us, where it probably was crazier. I might stop at Target, but never Walmart. I’m certain there are some people out there who worked retail in the 1990s, hated Black Friday back then, and think I’m insane for saying I used to enjoy it. That’s fair, and my perspective is no doubt framed by my personal experience. But the bottom line for me is that, as is often the case in the USA, marketers and retailers decided to take things past the point of diminishing returns. Too much of a good thing. Kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

Remember when Target, Walmart, and other stores actually opened on Thanksgiving Day? I can think of only one good thing about those days. My oldest, who has autism, would always be really wound up after spending Thanksgiving at two different houses with extended family from both his parents. So the ability to take him out to Grand Prairie Premium Outlets at 8:00pm on Thanksgiving so that he could walk with his father and release some energy was valuable. But I also recall feeling really terrible for the employees who had to leave their own families early that day to go to work. And I wondered about the benefits for the shoppers. Was it really worth it to go out on Thanksgiving Day to acquire more stuff?

Mercifully, those days are now behind us. But along the way, Black Friday has gone from an organic, interesting (and perhaps maddening) retail phenomenon to yet another contrived concoction of American advertisers. After the advent of Cyber Monday for online retailers, the actual concept of Black Friday has morphed into essentially a weeks-long festival of discounts online and in-store. If I had a nickel for every time I see “Black Friday Starts NOW” in my e-mail, I probably wouldn’t need to worry about saving any money on their special deals. The fact that retailers are willing to give us 15-30% off everything for a week or more is basically an admission that they’re inflating their margins most of the year. And instead of lower prices consistently feeding a stable retail environment that survives, if not thrives, we get inflated prices for much of the year with brief periods of unbridled spending, insane traffic, long lines, massive crowds, and a generally miserable experience.

And then there’s Small Business Saturday, “brought to you by American Express.” It was started in 2010 as a purported effort to support smaller stores who were harmed by the 2008 financial crisis. And while it seems like a well-meaning concept (because who thinks it’s a bad idea to help small business?), it is bitterly ironic that American Express is involved. Ask any small business owner, and they’ll freely tell you they cannot afford to accept American Express because the transaction fees for sellers are higher than nearly every other card. But then, irony in the USA appears to have quietly died many years ago, so who knows?

So Black Friday used to appeal to me, but it’s grown tiresome and I now actively seek to avoid it. And yet, I take heart in this development. My children are now grown, and their association with Christmas has evolved such that they value experiences and the spirit of the season far more than they do the quantity of presents under the tree. So we spend more of this season going out to see lights, watching movies, and of course, participating in Mass and other church activities. We still exchange a modest number of gifts among our family each Christmas, but we really have moved on from the consumer-driven aspects of the holiday. It’s refreshing. Meanwhile, I will always have my romanticized memories of a gentler time in American retail. And I will tip my hat to stores like REI, which closes on Black Friday for their “Opt Outside” initiative – they encourage everyone to avoid shopping and pursue an outdoor activity after all the food from Thursday. They even give their employees a paid day off to do the same. Sounds like a plan to me.

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Thankful for a Wonderful Year

Today is Thanksgiving, and it remains a Top 3 favorite holiday for me (I’ll write about the other 2 as they come up over the next 12 months). While I enjoy a day of family, food, and football, those are not the main reasons it’s a favorite. No, I enjoy it because it is a day devoted to gratitude. While that gratitude may align with the tenets of several religions, Thanksgiving Day isn’t reserved for any specific one, and I find that appealing. Considering that life itself is fairly miraculous, biologically speaking (especially for humans compared to other species), and our lives of prosperity in this place and time are filled with abundant relative luck, it just seems fitting that we spend at least one day per year reflecting on how blessed we really are. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re religious or not, if you even believe in God, or if you worship according to a different tradition.

2025, for me and my family, hasn’t exactly been an easy one. We dealt with a broken, leaking water heater in March that flooded a portion of the house and left us living in a nearby hotel for two weeks. Then we shared a single bathroom among 4 adults for an additional two months. In the summer, a routine mammogram for my wife led to an additional scan and eventually, a surgical procedure. For me, a physical exam and blood test in the spring led to some new daily medications and a few dietary alterations. Plus there were other nagging little issues throughout the year – nail in a tire here, minor illness there – the usual annoyances of life. The most bizarre incident of the year definitely happened in July, when a man (already known to Arlington PD as sometimes homeless and a frequent drug user) literally ripped the passenger side mirror off my car, walked off with it, then tossed it by the side of the road.

And yet, despite it all, I am perhaps more grateful this Thanksgiving than I have been in a while. We have had challenges, we have faced adversity, but we are still blessed in ways we need to appreciate. I honestly suspect that for me, whatever trials we did face may have actually emphasized how good we have it in the long run. I don’t want to offer a big laundry list of items; instead, I will focus on three fundamental things for which I am most thankful as we approach the end of 2025.

Good Health. “Wait, didn’t you just say that both you and your wife dealt with some health issues this year?!?” Yes, yes I did. But in the end, we’ve overcome those issues and established ourselves as relatively healthy, especially for our ages. My wife’s mammogram led, as you might have suspected, to a mention of “the big C,” but the subsequent procedures she endured revealed that it was caught early. Like, REALLY early. Designated as “Stage 0,” where it was identified and removed as particles, before any cells had a chance to organize and create the need for chemotherapy or radiation. Was it scary? Absolutely. But once the process was over, we were grateful that modern medicine has advanced to the point that it could be addressed this early. For the foreseeable future, it really just means more frequent and vigilant scanning to ensure similar particles don’t return. If that happens, we’ll deal with the ramifications. But the doctors have all indicated that the chances of recurrence are minimal.

As for me, I can say that learning about A1C levels in the blood was certainly educational, and it obviously wasn’t welcome news to hear that mine was too high. The same blood test also revealed high cholesterol, and I also found out I have high blood pressure. Fun! Time for a few drugs and dietary changes. I even tried Ozempic for a couple of months until insurance would no longer cover it. In the grand scheme of things, none of it was a big deal. Sure, I have to avoid fatty foods, sugary foods and bread now, but I do not miss them. Those foods and I had a great run, but all things change. I have to take 3 tiny pills once per day. So what. I needed to ramp up my physical activity even more, which I welcome.

As my doctor (who is awesome, BTW – Dr. Eric Hoffman in Arlington) pointed out, addressing these issues now, making the necessary changes, taking the appropriate prescriptions, etc., is far preferable to stubbornly adhering to old habits and rolling the dice with the ramifications in 5-10 years.

The bottom line is that, while my wife and I are not in perfect health (and really, who is?), we are healthy. The issues we’ve faced this year, in our mid-50s, are miniscule compared to what many, many people deal with. And we have been able to take care of these issues with minimal headache and expense. Considering what others experience versus what we have experienced – Good Health, check – thankful for it in 2025.

Supportive People. This item of thanks started, frankly, very trite. “Family and Friends,” yada, yada. And make no mistake about it, my family and friends are amazing. My wife is awesome, we still love each other madly, we get along great, and we still have enough disagreements to keep it interesting. My kids…also awesome. They’re now beyond teenage years (during which we had the good fortune of never dealing with typical teenage nonsense), they’re growing into responsible adults, and we’re able to relate to them very well. As for friends, I honestly don’t have a lot of close friends who I see and communicate with regularly. But those close friends that I do talk to regularly are also terrific – we can share details about our lives and reminisce about the past with equal energy. Also, we’re able to share frustrations about the petty annoyances of life without judgment. Just some good-natured venting at times.

But the more I thought about “family and friends,” great as they are, the more I realized that my gratitude in 2025 really moves beyond that relatively narrow scope. I have been blessed with supportive people in a much broader sphere of influence. Consider my doctor, for one, who I’ve already acknowledged as awesome. I come from a long line of stubborn know-it-alls, and part of breaking free of that attitude entails having professionals I can trust. My doctor is one of them, mainly because he pushes past any of my stubborn instincts and tells me plainly what I need, not what I want, to hear. I’m grateful for that because I know I’ll be healthier than my parents if I receive straight talk. All the doctors and other medical professionals under whose care my wife and I have been this year…also thankful for them. I’ll throw my auto mechanic in there as well – Pat Murphy in Arlington. Needed a brake pad replacement this year, and I’m not one to do it myself. Murphy’s Auto was literally the first and only place I called, because I know he’ll do it right and not try to sell me something I don’t need. If you have an honest, trustworthy mechanic, you, too, should be thankful for them.

It may seem odd to be thankful for insurance, but we’ve needed it this year – home, auto, and health. Our insurance has not disappointed. Our adjusters for the home repairs from the water heater and the auto repair on my mirror were professional and patient with us. I always felt like we were being served appropriately, never upsold, and never dismissed. In a world that often seems to grow more cynical and self-absorbed, it was gratifying. Our health insurance has also been much better than expected, even after we changed from one provider to another in September. Sure, Ozempic is no longer covered and now too expensive, and I would certainly love to see universal healthcare in the United States, but the costs we’ve encountered for necessary procedures this year have been acceptable, and the prescriptions we have are downright cheap. I know there are many Americans who cannot say the same, so I am incredibly thankful for our own situation.

But I think the supportive people for whom I may be the most thankful in 2025 are coworkers and colleagues, past and present. I retired from K-12 public education in July 2025, and the toughest part of the process was saying goodbye to many coworkers who are just really good people. Fortunately, I am able to communicate periodically with some of them. I also took a part-time job with my long-time church parish in October, and I’ve learned that my new coworkers are also incredibly nice, decent people. I’m truly thankful for coworkers who are drama-free and easy-going. We all need to appreciate people like this more. Reflecting on past coworkers has also generated much gratitude in my heart this year. One of my friends and coworkers from Summit High School lost a 6-year battle with cancer earlier this year. Of course, I miss him and was sad that he passed away, but the occasion also led many of us from years past to gather as we shared memories and supported his current colleagues as they dealt with his death. I was the first to say, “We need to gather together like this more often, and next time, let’s make sure it’s not just because someone has passed.” And I mean it. Like I said, I don’t have a bunch of close friends, but I am thankful for all the colleagues I’ve had over the years, because I consider so many of them friends despite the fact that we don’t see each other every day anymore. “Don’t be a stranger” is a mantra we need more often, and I hope to stay connected to some degree, particularly with many of my more recent colleagues who are still in the trenches of public education. I am thankful for the support of so many, and I hope to reciprocate as they traverse the nonsense that the current education system brings their way.

Retirement. Ah, yes, I saved the easy, long-hanging fruit for last. And it IS easy, right? You would think anyone who retires in a given year would say “I’m thankful for my retirement.” Who wouldn’t? But my retirement has proven serendipitous on several levels in only a few months, and that really fuels my gratitude for it.

To start, if I’m being truthful, I’ve been “ready to retire” for easily about 7 years now. I decided that I wanted to pursue voiceover as my official second career back in 2018, when I created my LLC, signed up for coaching, attended VO Atlanta, and really started taking the business seriously. In my last couple of years in Mansfield ISD, I was able to utilize and build my VO skills within the context of my education career. When I left for Birdville ISD, my VO career came to a not-quite-screeching halt. My boss there (who was horrible in several ways) kind of resented that I had a VO business because it meant I wasn’t going home and working 2-3 extra hours on assessment and accountability nonsense. During my 5 years in Grand Prairie ISD, I did what I could on the VO side, but the two careers were clearly separate and not terribly symbiotic. My education career very much “crowded out” my voiceover career. I realized during these years that I couldn’t fully embark on voiceover like I wanted until I was free of education. Based on my age and where I was in that career, that meant retirement. I even tried to retire in 2024, but much like Michael Corleone, “they pulled me back in.” Only to experience a year that was at once farcical and tumultuous and idiotic and exhausting and unintentionally comical. At least I finally pulled the proverbial trigger this year and didn’t look back.

And it’s worked out for my VO career to some degree. Thanks to a nice reference from UT-Arlington’s Associate Director of Bands, I made my way into PA announcing for UTA men’s and women’s basketball. They’re auditioning several different voices in 2025-26, and I’ve already announced three NCAA Division I basketball games so far. There might be more later this season, and I have a legitimate chance to book that gig full-time by Fall 2026. And I’ve continued to book other PA work for Spring 2026 and beyond. Besides PA work, I’ve had more time for coaching, the ability to record a new demo and revise another one, and I still have additional coaching and events to come before the end of 2025. 2026 should definitely be my year for aggressively marketing my VO business and pursuing a wider range of work. (Finally!)

In the meantime, as you might expect, retirement has improved my health. It turns out not having the daily grind of waking at 5:00am, spending time in traffic, working 8 or more hours each day, and spending more time in traffic has been beneficial. Who knew, right? My initial diagnoses regarding blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol came at the end of May. My last day dealing with the idiocy of educational assessment was June 17. In September, I had a 3-month follow-up appointment – my weight was down, along with my blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar. Coincidence?

And yet, I did try to mess it up. Another district had a Director position in central office, and I applied and interviewed, foolishly thinking that a higher salary might be incentive to stick with K-12 education for at least another 3-5 years. Maybe this actual logic, or simply trepidation at the thought of not getting an ISD-based paycheck. And I was the leading candidate…but in the end, the district hired someone else. Not sure why that happened, but I don’t care, because sometimes we end up grateful later on that things didn’t actually work out. See, I received the news literally while I was in the waiting room at one of my wife’s medical procedures. My retirement – and enhanced free time – allowed me to be right by her side for all of them during her ordeal. I didn’t have to take time off, go back to work and focus on stuff that I had missed, or really ever think about anything but supporting her. Coincidence?

Then in September, the opportunity to work at my longtime church parish became available. It’s essentially a record-keeping job, 4 hours each day, in a low-stress environment, with great people (as I noted earlier). The work may seem like mostly menial tasks to an outsider, but it’s rewarding to serve the church I’ve attended since I was 3 years old, and it certainly matters more to me than any of the standardized assessment noise had become. (Read more about that here.) And the salary from this job more than offsets the difference between my retirement income and my previous salary. So I am literally making more money now in a low-stress, high-satisfaction situation than I was when dealing with high school testing tasks ad nauseam. Coincidence?

I am thus incredibly thankful for retirement, not just in general, but specifically at this time in my life, and in this year. Considering all the pitfalls I seem to have encountered since about 2019, throwing me off-track, to have all of these things working out in my favor now falls somewhere between magic and divine intervention.

It is not lost on me that we have, in the end, received good fortune in 2025, be it from God, or fate, or karma…whatever. I am thankful for all of it. I refuse to get caught up in self-pity over health challenges, or an added expense here or there because of “sh** happens,” or a lost job opportunity. We’ve been the benefactors of decent insurance coverage and excellent care from a host of professionals, medical and otherwise. I have been the recipient of camaraderie and support from some fantastic people, and my primary intention is to ensure that I match that support and show proper appreciation for them. And I have finally retired from my first career, in which I had clearly advanced to the “negative returns” phase, to pursue the next one, and enter the next phase of a life that I consider far from over. 2025 wasn’t a challenging year; it was really a watershed year. And I am absolutely grateful for what it has given me.