One last ice-storm photo:



Campus is open today. My office, perhaps-not-inexplicably and perhaps-not-unexpectedly is 15 degrees Celsius. There is cold air shawling down from the ceiling. I suppose some people would be storming off to the administration building screaming that it is unacceptable that their office is so cold, but at this point I've become inured to the climate-control issues in this building and I just kind of shrug. And besides, there are few people on campus before 8 am, sometimes before 9 am. So again, I shrug. I planned to leave after my office hours were over anyway for a grocery (and a few lab supplies I need for tomorrow's replacement lab: it will be too cold and nasty to do the outdoor lab I planned) run.

At least the classrooms are warm enough. I checked. However, I do not know how many of my ten in my 8:00 class (my sole class of the day) are going to be able to get in to campus. Even driving around town is somewhat treacherous; a few people have apparently left their lawn sprinklers on, which means that the curbside lane is filled with ice. Even the alternate (non-tree-heavy, non-hill) route I took had icy patches.

As for knitting - I have the left front of the Central Park hoodie up to the sleeve-decrease part. I also started a new pair of socks - once again, just simple socks, to be knit on while reading or at other times when my brain is otherwise occupied. I'm using a ball of Opal Magic (working down the surprisingly massive sockyarn stash) in a hot pink.


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Added, about 10 am: Well, 70% of the class showed up, which is pretty darn good. I'm pleased. (One of my colleagues went out of town this weekend and he is stuck out of town. I will not comment on the foresight or lack thereof involved in taking a non-essential trip the weekend of an ice storm).

I'm trying a new lab this week in one of my classes: Natural selection simulation. I hope it goes well because it's frankly a better lab than the one I've used for years, which was based on a lab a former colleague of mine wrote. But I have to bone up on the new lab myself and make sure I know what's going on as there's more complexity to this new lab.

And two more wonderful posts from Mental Multivitamin. One is about Babe, which is among my favorite movies EVER.

One of the reasons I love it so much is that the ultimate message of the movie (or at least what I believe is the ultimate message) is something I love and cherish: That being polite and treating people with respect will earn you success faster and more easily than being a bully ever would.

I also love the movie for its never-never land aspect. The farm - and the sheepdog trials - and everything - could be in North Carolina. Or it could be somewhere in New England. Or it could be in Britain. Or it could be in New Zealand. Although, actually, it's not really anywhere REAL: there's an idealized glow about the place, everything is cleaner and gentler and more subtle than real life, and even the slightly antiquated appliances in the farmhouse give a romantic aspect, rather than a "we MUST replace this wretched old heater" aspect.

And I agree with the comment that the language (and syntax) are more articulate and smarter than in any of the R-rated movies I've seen. There's a writerly aspect to the movie that I love...the narration seems to be written by someone who loves language and uses it well. Language is like any tool. Or rather, perhaps, it's more like an employee: treat it well, respect it, and it will reward you with loyalty and will produce things that are delightful. Abuse it, and it will fail you, perhaps even conspire against you.

I like it when people cherish language. It is probably our greatest human invention and the thing that has allowed civiliation to progress as much as it has.

Speaking of cherishing language and using it well, M-MV also has a quotation from one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speeches. About the "drum major" instinct.

I had not read/heard that bit before, but I find myself nodding in agreement. I've felt that, oh Lord, how I've felt that - the desire to be noticed, to be the "best" at something...and conversely, the sad flat feeling of realizing that you are not the "best," that you will never be the "best," especially when it is a skill you thought you had particularly honed.

And yes, too, that peculiarly cringing and horrible feeling that you get when you feel jealous of the praise someone else receives - first, the not-right feeling of the jealousy, the sense of the injustice being done you. And then the realization - that you ARE jealous, and that you (generally) have no right to be, and then the feeling (the cringing part) that you are less of a person than you thought yourself to be because you are capable of that jealousy...

And so we see it everywhere, this quest for recognition. And we join things, overjoin really, that we think that we will find that recognition in.

How much human misery have we caused ourselves* by joining things or volunteering for things or doing things that really and truly don't delight us, because we think they will gain us recognition? Or because someone flattered us into it by praise and "But you'll do SUCH a good job!" And how much of the whole social experiment, how much of work-life, has bought into this need for recognition - this idea that if you're not doing XYZ in addition to your regular duties, you're not somehow pulling your weight as a human being? How much clawing and climbing could we avoid if we recognized the drum major instinct as something that gets between us and our real selves - or between us and God?

I don't know - as I said, were I in church when this sermon was being preached, I'd be squirming in my seat and trying to make myself as small as possible because I recognize that a big part of the darker side of my personality involves my longing for "major awards" to hang on my wall - as proof of my fitness to be human, at the most basic and cold level. And how some days the little bits of "proof" - the kind words, the feeling that I helped someone - aren't enough, because those "major awards" aren't there...and also my disgusted frustration with myself for feeling that I NEED those "major awards," and my (probably false) sense of my own failure when those infrequently-given-awards do not come my way...

(*I am using a form of the "royal we" here, as a means of trying to distance myself a LITTLE bit from something I do see in myself and would turn away from.)