If I had a Twitter account this might be a good one for that forum. The grown-ups in the house watched the first half of the fourth Harry Potter film last night. It got too late to watch the rest. It is in the works, queued up for part two.
My wife makes popcorn. Usually that task falls to me. But she is giving me time to write this. So I write this because I am not making popcorn. And I am not making popcorn because I am writing this.
OK Harry Potter. I think I’m ready.
When I started this blog on WordPress it was because I had a blog elsewhere and decided to get a little more serious. A few years ago I heard about this new social networking site for folks with an environmental/human rights/do the right thing in the world bent and it seemed as good a place as any to explore the world of blogging. It served me well for a while but I needed a change.
I still have an account on the site (you can see it here) and I occasionally check it. On a whim I typed “UFO” into the search tool and learned that, apparently, there was a UFO at Obama’s inauguration. Whoda thunk? There was a whole discussion around this event. If I only checked my account more frequently I might have a part of that important online communication. Too bad for me.
Here is at least one of the version of the video:
So today I hurried back to the grind of working a job after a couple weeks of holiday vacation. It was, as they say in the taciturn parts of this state, not a bad thing to be off for so long. While it wasn’t bad to get started again, I hopped into the saddle with some trepidation.
I don’t mean trepidation as in “It’s been so long I am a little scared I won’t know what to do or where to go.” I mean it more in the “Dang it is awfully nice not to have to work for someone else or really to have to work at all and boy wouldn’t it be great if I could keep all this material greatness and quit the day job?” sense. That is the kind of trepidation I mean.
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to fit one long, uncommonly uttered word into just a few sentences of something more than one person will read at least three times. Check that off my list. If we can jump to the meta-cognition level here, when except over the holidays, when I can sleep in until 7:30 (7:30!) for three days straight, would I ever have the idea encompassed in the previous sentence? See what I mean? Not working means thinking deep thoughts, thoughts that can only come when one truly relaxes.
Alas, I was back to the work thing today. I did watch it snow from the warm side of the window. That was, and I’m not afraid of being called effeminate or even (heavens!) a pansy if I use the word, lovely. Then I drove home on the icy and slippery asphalt, hands clenched on the wheel, sweating in the down jacket I both didn’t need and forgot to take off in my haste to get to the post office, slowly.
The saddle in which I returned my physical self was metaphorical, of course. I’m no wrangler. I’m no jockey. I can’t even really call myself a desk jockey anymore, although I did spend way too much time sitting today. My saddle was a chair in this case. At the end of the day I rode off into the screen saver sunset, bouncing along peacefully on the pneumatic riser of the padded office seat. It was a lovely way to end the day. And a lovely way to start the week.
I recently discovered a Vermont blog that has some appeal to me. The View From the Last House in America claims to offer up “one life, lived in Vermont, and oddments.” Sounds good to me. That actually sounds about like what I’ve got here. Two posts on the site caught my attention.
One was called Who Cares What You Think? This seems a reasonable question to me. If you are going to write something that any random monkey can find, at least entertain the monkey. It is the question for anyone who cares to blog. I would love it if someone thought what I put down here interesting and worth musing over. Heck, I need affirmation as much as the next guy. But it ought to be interesting and not just pretend to be interesting. So that is my renewed challenge: to avoid proffering up tripe.
The second thing that I found interesting was a post about Seven Random Things. I like this idea. I was reading recently in Orion magazine an essay called Notes From a Very Small Island by Erik Reese. He talks about Nietzsche’s call for “an end of philosophy” and how we should really embrace art, especially poetry. He expounds on what this means to himself and I was struck by this sentence:
The true poem captures not just what is seen, but the experience of seeing. Poetry, we might say, is the aura thrown around an ordinary object to show that, in fact, it isn’t ordinary at all.
This captures well what I love about poetry. My favorite poems are about standing in line or shoveling snow or drinking beer on a porch. This idea of writing about seven random things really gets at the idea of poetry or, if one carries it back around, to philosophy. The question, if one takes on this challenge, is this: Can you find meaning in those objects and then share it in a way that has meaning to the reader? I like the idea. I’ll try it at some point.
And the third thing is this: it is snowing. The snow and rain and sleet and freezing rain (we may get all of them) might fall all night. Snow day tomorrow? I have mixed feelings about it. One one hand I get as excited as I did when I was ten when I think about school being canceled and a bonus day at home. On the other hand, it is a big old hassle to make up my meetings with students when school is closed. I don’t want to have to add a day, but I also would love to sit and watch the weather and drink some foamy coffee drink in my pajamas.
If tomorrow comes in with gray and slush and I don’t need to drive, then I will take on the seven random things challenge in the morning. If we have rain and school, then it will have to wait. In any case, even if you made it this far in this post you may still be wondering, enough to not at all consider reading the next one, Who Cares What You Think?
Mercury on the Move 