Removing Obstacles to Homework

February 26th, 2005 § 1

I have home­work to do — actu­ally, a physics exam for which I need to study — but between things I have to do and things I’d rather be doing, no test prep is get­ting done at all. Yes­ter­day, work turned out to be some­what busy, although with mun­dane things rather than the recent trend of fires-needing-putting-out. Today, work is pro­gress­ing in a sim­i­larly pedes­trian mode, and both the lure of the web and my guilt over not hav­ing posted in a while have been tempt­ing me away from New­ton and his laws. There­fore, here is a post — an exced­ingly ran­dom one — to assuage my blogger’s guilt.

Today was open­ing day for Smoo’s soft­ball league. There was a cer­e­mony fol­lowed by a scrim­mage, dur­ing which the Smooper made some fine plays and pitched bet­ter than I have ever seen her pitch. It always brings me so much joy to watch her play — her nat­ural ath­leti­cism shows, as does her love of the game — and these two things plus occa­sional plays wor­thy of the pros (biased? me? I don’t think so…) make spec­tat­ing a rare treat. Keep it up, Smoop! You rock the bases! A good num­ber of the par­ents at the cer­e­mony, how­ever, did not rock the bases. I may be over-sensitive from years as a musi­cal per­former, but even with­out hav­ing had the shush beat into me as a child, I can’t imag­ine that I wouldn’t have found all the inane, poorly-timed yam­mer­ing that cov­ered up the poor micro­phone­less pre­sen­ters to be unbear­ably rude. There were chil­dren fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of these man­ner­less adults, but I hardly blame them, hav­ing wit­nessed the exam­ples by which they are learn­ing. Inter­est­ing to note, though, that all were silent dur­ing a spec­tac­u­lar 8-year-old-on-an-electric-guitar ver­sion of the Star Span­gled Ban­ner… even the dogs stopped bark­ing and sat at atten­tion. :) Any­way, the par­ents and play­ers on Smoop’s team seem to be good peo­ple, and I look for­ward to a sea­son of “shak­ing my pom-poms” at as many Force games as I can attend. They are the gothest look­ing team around in all black with red accou­trements — I may have to find some black leather pom-poms somewhere.

The other day, I went to the Barnes and Noble near­est me to see if they had a copy of Henry Mancini: Pink Gui­tar, and was told that it was not some­thing they car­ried in-store, but was instead one of their “ship-to-home-only” items. I had for­got­ten about this rel­a­tively new sales ploy of B&N’s, but hav­ing had this reminder, am even more sure of its folly than I was when it was first intro­duced shortly before my depar­ture from their employ. As a ser­vice to B&N, there­fore, I offer this advice: for the most part, when a per­son goes into a book­store to shop, they do so either to a) make a pur­chase there and then, or b) get a look at some­thing they aren’t sure about buy­ing, but upon becom­ing sure, are plan­ning to buy online after a bit of price-comparison brows­ing. By hav­ing items that are not in store and not avail­able for order into a store for obligation-free exam­i­na­tion, you are alien­at­ing the first kind of shop­per for cer­tain, and the sec­ond kind to a large extent. If you want to have stores, have them. If you want to elim­i­nate the middle-store, go online-only and offer prices that at least come close to Ama­zon and other online shops. This half-assed enforce­ment of semi-online shop­ping is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive for both you and the cus­tomer, and is bound to hurt you in the long run.

Even after wit­ness­ing all kinds of bad man­ners ear­lier today, I firmly believe that humans are no less well-mannered than they were at any other point in his­tory. Rather than the amount of man­ners being less or more than in other eras, I find that the out­ward man­i­fes­ta­tions and smaller, fringe man­i­fes­ta­tions of eti­quette change along­side changes in tech­nol­ogy, reli­gion and the like. There­fore, as an exam­ple, to some­one from the early half of the 1900s, it may seem that any use of a cell phone is a trav­esty, as opposed to see­ing accept­abil­ity in ways that the more mod­ern well-mannered per­son would see as accept­able. Any­one dis­agree? I am curious…

Also on my mind: I have noticed of late that each time I visit my shrink I spend the rest of that day — and some­times sub­se­quent days — deep in my depressive/anxiety-laden hole. It seems to me that my appoint­ments embody what could be termed psy­chi­atric scab-picking, and, for all the good that it does in the long run by bring­ing wounds out in the open to heal, it is less pleas­ant to me than find­ing a book or a movie or a web-page into which I can crawl and hide — much less cold and clammy and numb­ing than my hole, home tho the hole may be.

I really have to get going on my home­work. D said he’d help me study later, but I want to do well, really, I do. There­fore, I leave you all with some cur­rent social com­men­tary via link:

  • A quote from the film critic C. A. Leje­une by way of Neil Gaiman’s blog:
    “It is true that it may be eas­ier to have wit than, in the deep­est and most endur­ing sense, to have imag­i­na­tion. But it is eas­ier to pre­tend to have imag­i­na­tion than to pre­tend to have wit. A pre­tender may get away with a phoney poem, because it is the priv­i­lege of a poet to be mys­te­ri­ous. But a pre­tender can­not get away with a phoney joke, because it is the point of a joke to be seen.”

  • An arti­cle by a Mr. Michael Gor­man, president-elect of the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion, in which he doubts “that many of the Blog Peo­ple are in the habit of sus­tained read­ing of com­plex texts.” The Blog Peo­ple indeed. I am agi­tat­edly pac­ing some­where between indig­na­tion and dis­gust. How sad that CSU Fresno has cho­sen such a backward-facing per­son to head the depart­ment I yearn most to join, and how ironic that most of the inspi­ra­tion that has pushed me toward a career as a librar­ian has come from blog­ging librarians.
  • Infor­ma­tion about the dif­fer­ences between UK and US smiles.
  • A col­lec­tion of quotes from the deli­ciously frank Bill Hicks (may his atoms have recy­cled into some of the finest fun­gus and herb ever fuel­ing inspi­ra­tion) — he was about as tact­ful yet refresh­ing as a 2x4 upside the head.
  • An expla­na­tion from the ever-fascinating Michael Dirda about why we should love Lovecraft.
  • A set of par­ents act­ing in a way I would never wish some­one act toward me, and a man act­ing in a way I would never act myself.
  • A list of occa­sion­ally dubi­ous but almost con­sis­tently inter­est­ing information.
  • A per­fect sub­sti­tu­tion.

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