I’m reading Holy the Firm for class this morning. It’s an unusually early morning for me, and I may finish the book by 8am, the time I’m usually just opening up my brain. It was first published in 1977, which I can see in its language. And still one of the threads in it is […]
I’m hitting the semester-point where my mind keeps skiving off toward other* pastures while returning to ruminate about the stacks of work at hand. So here’s a similarly disconnected bit. I like to sit, reading, at the kitchen table, folded up like a glove-box map. It’s becoming steadily more clear that this is terrible for […]
One of my classmate-friends turned to me this morning and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in jeans before!” I replied, “I wore these on Sunday, so today’s the day I’m wearing them again—conservation of laundry.” I’ve been a laundry conservationist for a long time. Some of what drives it is what you’d […]
There’s a colleague of mine here, part of the first-year cohort (my cohort), that will slip into our classrooms ahead of time and write “After School Detention” on the chalkboard, and a brief set of classmate names below. This has been annoying my other colleagues, in a “wtf?” sort of way. To me, it’s a […]
“Has there been an experience in your life when God helped you do what you felt was impossible?” —Journeying Through Lent with Mark, Greg Weyrauch Just before this, the devotional writer described a day when he had nothing, so drained that he would have lain in bed except for the responsibilities that dragged him on. […]
This is not the original essay of the same title by Bertrand Russell and published in the October 1932 issue of Harper’s. That one is much more polished and witty, because Bertrand Russell-! and because I’m going to write this for me more than for any other audience. ** Yesterday had a 4am wakeup, a […]
It’s rare to find a pop song where the words line up so thoroughly-! My Sweetie:You’re my best rebound, my wonderful “obvious choice” (back then obvious to everyone but me!). And at this point, I’ve spent more of my life with you than without… I am who I am now because you are who you […]
Type Five EnneaThought® for March 19th Make this Affirmation today: “I now affirm that my life and struggles are meaningful and rewarding.” (Enneagram Transformations, 74) The difficulty I have with this is, perhaps, that quality mentioned in Enneagram literature about Fives seeing clearly. Very, very clearly. So in its form today (substantially less than the […]
In my personal life, I have a fairly streamlined life. If you don’t count the books (!) I don’t display a lot of knick-knacks. There’s the owl collection I inherited, but most of the flat surfaces here are available for books and papers to rest on. Which they do! ** Two happy things overlapped this […]
We have a guest arriving soon-ish to Chez Soques. Tidy-minded as we are, over Thursday night’s dinner we reminded ourselves to make the guest room ready… which I internalized as: finish out the half-projects that got tucked in there. Objects standing in for the projects in play: boxes of books that might go into our […]
