Post - Educationalism

Funny how after all these years out of formal schooling, it still feels like something is ending come September.  Too many good memories to account for them here. And so starts another 'semester' of hard-nosed, book grinding, tea-sipping, stress-jogging efficacy. CLU Designation - Your days are numbered Algebra I/II - Re-mastery in the making Masters - Closer to reality Book - The note taking begins That should get me to Thanksgiving. 

[Dedicated to Mom: You know I'm just kidding...] It was an early summer, Sunday morning.  The kind where the flies don't seem such a nuisance with pancakes on the griddle, a pot of syrup bubbling on the stove with berries of red and blue and a healthy dose of butter mixed in for good measure.  Sun pours through kitchen windows, and kids run about, fighting and hollering until plates are set and food is ready.  Silver dollars never had such power but in pancake form. Fast forward 20 years It's that same type of early summer, Sunday morning.  But now the griddle is idle and looks a forgotten shrine (though still more sacred than traditional ones), and the only remnants of a shared meal drips off of the counter onto tile floor as the cat laps up spilled milk.  The kids are still fighting and it seems that the currencies have changed: "Mom, I can't believe we're taking Conan.  I mean, we're hiking up a mountain, he'll just complaint he whole time ...

And the start of many goals: #1: Hike all 150 miles of the Lassen National Park trails (and log all the geocaches!) #2: Finish CLU certification (even if it means bringing textbooks hiking) #3: Perfect baking skills #4: Be the board

Subtitle: Why I Love My Family "Honey, what's that?" "I think it's a mouse." "No Mom, it looks like a mole." "Come on, have neither of you ever seen a gopher?" "Oh, yeah, I see it now.  Definitely a gopher." Dad bends down and pets the cat on the head, and tells him that the gopher-mole-mouse corpse dangling by a canine is a very good thing, and that he's a very special cat.   The cat, known here simply as Tetos--as Mr. Tetos to his peers, I'm sure--had just interrupted the communal, after-dinner clean-up by lolloping in with the half-dead gophermole only to ensure it's entire death by flinging it into the air, across kitchen floor sending it smack into oak-stained cabinets, shaking the Tupperware inside.  I have to admit I did feel something when the cat waltzed in there with that fear-ridden-faced mouser, bopping him around like the toys other members of the family spoiled him with as a kitten (I...

Good books stay with us like good friends pages like voices, so oft repeated phrases stories like memories and lovers noted and not yet come words that speak as only  between us and bent spine in moments reflected upon the history of a body a life whose story would go untold save for dogeared edges and errant marks that blot facade and good face betrays more than just prose that voice, a living novel reveals to us more as we go persists in hidden corners of mind and troubled mouth couches and coffee tables dusty shelves and old bus stops as eddies in a stream or deep undertow at sea rescues us from broken, shallow homes buried deep within a tale weaves and cuts into our passions, into stories we thought our own

My contribution to the annual, office newsletter, cross-posted from my financial/work interpretation-of-the-world blog : Ordinary Lang uage Finance . Even in America, the land of the second chance, and of transcendentalist redeemers, the paradox inevitably arises: you cannot change the world (for example, a state of marriage [or conversely: an economy]) until the people in it change, and the people cannot change until the world changes. - Stanley Cavell I hadn't seen this passage since the middle-years of college (if you remember those days too, it was a different time back then--long before I personally came to an inkling's understanding of the power of tragedy, and the subsequent flow of change). During those shattering years, I questioned the purpose of many practices and sites of genius. I wondered why so many studied the tragic Greek plays, the tragic writings of Kafka, or the tragic films; I wondered why people didn't focus solely on the works of those who burned br...