Sunset
Posted: February 15th, 2008 under personal.
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Posted: February 15th, 2008 under personal.
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prag·mat·ic: related to matters of fact or practical affairs.
ex·pe·di·ent: concern with what is opportune; especially : governed by self-interest.
con·science: a faculty, power, or principle enjoining good acts.
insanity: lack of good sense or judgment.
Is it pragmatic to do what we are told when reason and experience tells us we will not succeed?
Is it expedient to divert ourselves from meaningful contribution?
Some achieve success by accomplishing little. They don’t create, they consume. They wring wealth from the sweat of another’s brow.
For the rest of us, playing along defies sense. We surrender our best selves to a creeping mediocrity which will eventually rob us of much more than we risk by acting from conscience now.
Why surrender to the group insanity of business as usual?
Posted: February 15th, 2008 under personal.
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I’ve been reading Grimm’s fairy tales to my daughter.
Hans the Hedgehog is a 19th century, Germanic mind !#@$ — for children.
“…he made the cock fly on to a high tree with him, and there he sat for many a long year, and watched his asses and swine until the herd was quite large, and his father knew nothing about him.”
“While he was sitting in the tree, however, he played his bagpipes, and made music which was very beautiful.”
Gorgeous, grotesque and entirely insensitive to gender and race; daughters sacrificed and an enchanted youth whitened by ‘precious salves’.
Posted: February 5th, 2008 under personal.
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Washington D.C. in August. Co-workers, spouses, children walking a bland but unfamiliar sidewalk. A mundane but entirely new experience.
A fact unknowable but the thought occurs.
This team — this particular ascent will come to an end. We are as close to our summit as memory and quantum physics allows us to mark.
I plant my flag and move on.
Posted: January 31st, 2008 under personal.
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This is what a solved subtraction problem looks like using the technique my second grader is learning.
At first she was drawing all sixty squares. I talked her into drawing tens as long rectangles.
A page of homework is 20 problems. Each problem takes 3-5 minutes. She also has writing and reading.
To fight the tedium, we used legos one day and a whiteboard another.
But the teacher likes to see the written squares to confirm the kids understand. So while making things physical makes it more fun it only adds time.
I know she’s drifting when she starts climbing the table or erases mistakes until the paper rips.
Any constructive advice?
Posted: January 29th, 2008 under personal.
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Posted: January 27th, 2008 under personal.
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I was helping my daughter with her homework.
She said her teacher didn’t want her carrying over tens the way I was showing her, “she hadn’t taught it to them yet.”
Stumped by that one, the best I could suggest was doing it anyway and erasing the evidence.
Posted: January 25th, 2008 under personal.
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My old team gave me a Despair, Inc. calendar for my birthday.

Posted: January 20th, 2008 under personal.
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Posted: January 20th, 2008 under personal.
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Posted: December 11th, 2007 under personal.
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