The Heidelberg and the Ganges Dammed

Finally, life has returned to normal. I'm in my office, ordering food, planning to work a late night, while my wife goes shopping for furniture. And this weekend, I went kayaking in my new boat, got a little scared by the big waves, and considered borrowing money in order to purchase a couch. If only I'd managed to slip a few hip openers in here and there.

Borrowing money to buy a couch. Yes, I know. Ridiculous. But you should see this couch. And we are in love. With the couch. It's impossible to understand unless you have sat on the W. Schillig Heidelberg yourself. Until that happens, please refrain from judging. And I realize that this is what all those preachers and other know-everything-with-certainty people have been warning us (the United States) about. Namely, that if we allow gay marriage, well, it's a slippery slope. To couch love.

But the real world makes the union impossible. It's a class thing. The Heidelberg is quality German money. And well, I'm from Mississippi, grew up in a log cabin, and my grandmother lives in a single-wide trailer with a house built around it. Yes, yes, I know. That makes me real, down to earth, and I should revel in what wisdom I will someday gain from my exoteric approach to the finer things. But that doesn't eliminate her siren like call for my rear end. Quiet, but a deafening roar whenever I have the misfortune of sitting on another couch. We all have aristocratic airs we'd like to loose. And the Heidelberg is a fitting throne, a sensual symbol of esoteric belonging, to be one of the few who can exchange knowing glances about the calming comfort of s-spring frame suspension, enhanced by cushions of dueling foam densities and coiled spring core. A form that refuses torque. And skin, well, soft, inviting, and lasting.

But again, we are of different world. The salesman (an African citizen of the world with a design degree from a school in London) assured us that the Butterfly ultrasuede fabric could only be cut if deliberately attacked with a knife. He deigned to demonstrate. Amy cut him off at the word. Impossible. We believe you, just don't hurt the Heidelberg.

But we should have allowed it; in the end, like a tragic play, bodies would be laying around all over the place anyway. Our story could only end in tragedy. You see, the Heidelberg costs three thousand dollars, and that's not even with leather. There are times when grubbing social climbers like ourselves must just accept our fate and merely feign the power to buy finery. Probably such a moment is now. Even so, I'm afraid that she has us in her grip. Amy actually said outloud, while reaching out to me dramatically, "I love this couch. I could not live without it." She did not say, "I cannot live without it." That's what silly teenagers say when infatuated and it belies a lack of depth and an infatuation with the present moment, a time that quickly changes. No, she said, "I could not live without the Heidelberg." An entirely different matter, it suggests depth, and understanding of future consequences. This is Antigone time. And normally, I might tear along weighing possibilities, consequences, skipping along the surface of yuppie life like the Ganges. But this time, I sighed and only nodded, managing to add, "Oh my god," in a whisper.

Today's rule: to either purchase the Heidelberg or not, and be done with it.

Ichabod Crane and Me

Tonight I left work late in the dark and rain. Not so strange and not so bad. However, this evening was slightly different. I left on my bike. Like a deformed bike messenger suffering from an enormous, but surprisingly unimpairing hunchback, I slid out of the parking garage and into the rain, my backpack stuffed and under my raincoat, which was under a long sleeve white shirt, with the green cuffs of the rain coat puffing out at the wrists. Top it off with a blue bike helmet over the green hood of the raincoat, and accent with flowing red Umbros. I was ready to take on the Capital Crescent.

I have since learned that my plan was actual illegal. And for good reason, which I believe because of experience. The Capital Crescent trail is closed at night, and probably especially at night when it is raining, and very especially when you're speeding on your bike, moving as fast as possible to avoid being waylaid by criminals, gang members, headless horseman, highwaymen, whatever.

I felt more than a little like Ichabod Crane, and feeling that way made the trip definitely worthwhile. It was an adventure, more than a little dangerous, though more because of speed and road conditions than the threat of criminal activity. It was exciting, nerve-wracking, definitely confronting some minor fears and the elements. But more than all this, it helped bring me closer to the authors of all those old fairy tales and the readers and listeners that have been so enthralled by them.

Panic, flight, fear, and petrified. I know the story of Ichabod Crane not from reading the story by Irving, but from Disney. Thus, in my mind Ichabod is a really silly character whose death is ambiguous and actually a little humorous. If I recall correctly, his flight from the headless horseman was more than a little comical, ducking the horseman's sword by sinking his head into his shirt so far that..whoa...for just a second we wonder if he really has lost his head, before he timidly pops it back out again. In the end we assume he's dead, because he disappears and the cartoon focuses on a few falling leaves on the ground, or something like that. And so, as a child, I watched the cartoon rapt and laughing, maybe a little gripped by the action, but certainly not grasping what makes the tale literature. But after last night, I think I know why the story has survived. It is about fear, driving fear. A kind of fear that very few of us ever experience any more. It is very rare, after all, for persons living in my socio-economic stratum to ever truly fear for danger, or at least to fear over an extended period of time.

But as I was sailing along in the dark, my mind was diverted by worries of random miscreants, the worry that I would interrupt some MS 13 gang meeting, that I would run off the path and down the bluff into a ravine, any number of horrid and ridiculous scenarios, and yes, about headless horsemen. My poor mother, or Amy, my friends, what a nightmare, to lose someone to violence...especially for making such a stupid decision: to head down a clearly haunted trail at night and be piked by a mythological creature.

Darkness is bad news for bikers. You can see the road in front of you, it's coming on to quickly, but the road ahead is a weird whitish, grayish blur, blending with what you can make of the trees. It's all wet, reflecting what little light there is, and what little light there is either blinds you or reflects off the blacktop and the leaves. The road moves ahead of you at your speed, but about 20 feet in front of you it rises up to form a whitish wall. In fact, once it was not the road but a large tree that had fallen across the trail. I'm not sure why, but my sense of dread increased for no obvious reason, enough to cause me to slow down before I ran pellmell into the tree doing myself serious injury.

When I did stop, there I was, surrounded by darkness, before a large tree that was completely invisible to me only seconds before.

So, speed was dangerous. In that situation, you are always overdriving your visibility, but you have to keep moving, as fast as you can. Regardless of the fact that you may be soon decapitated by a headless horseman, or low hanging limb. It is your only defense. Speed is what gets you home, out of this mess. Speed helps you surprise those who may have wanted to lay in wait, or break through those hoping to stop you and deliver some horrid punishment meted out by the gods, for some past sin or tragic flaw.

And the hypersensitivity to speed is where Ichabod and I became one (other similarities, like physical appearance, aside). Because Ichabod knew that moving quickly on his horse in the dark was incredibly dangerous, but moving too slow was terrifying, because moving quickly is your one advantage over the night.

Your imagination is the source of most of the terror, but I was tearing along, blinking through the rain, feeling quite proud of myself for finding such a challenge in urban Northwest D.C. I was, after all, mediating my mind's confrontation with wet unknown darkness potentially inhabited by dangerous ill-wishing criminal types lurking everywhere, all the while speeding along on a bicycle, hurtling towards a mistake in hand-eye coordination and sudden crash and death. I would only have been prouder of myself if I'd been spinning plates on a pole in my helmet at the same time.

As I was hurtling towards Bethesda and a firmly rooted conclusion that this was probably a mistake, I was also realizing the value of ghost stories. I noticed that I was relishing my fear, sort of playfully wallowing in it. It's not that I rationalized it away, and was simply enjoying observing myself being human, afraid and fearful (though I admit that this schizophrenia was part of my sense of purpose filled euphoria). It was mostly that I began to understand ghost stories as a source of inspiration. They filled my mind with problems to solve, contingencies to plan for, and serious incentive to keep pedalling, and to do so quickly. And man, did I pedal.

Today's rule: if I ever have a child who pulls an stupid Ichabod Crane stunt like I did tonight, I will act very angry with her.

Furniture and a fading weekend

Nice weekend, but busy week. It's already Wednesday, blazing by. The weekend is so far distant now that it has almost slipped over the horizon. A warm red glow, kind of dyeing my memory of it, is all that's left, reminding me that it was good. Amy and I spent the weekend together, virtually every moment. Much of what we needed to do was left undone. Suited me fine.

We went furniture shopping, slipped on the mantle of enthusiastic rich yuppie entitlement and expected, and received, excellent customer service while test bouncing on horribly expensive couches.

We encountered three very distinct character of salesperson. The upscale, sell on brand and knowledge. The middle of the road, sell on practicality and affordability. And the furniture factory warehouse, exploit and exacerbate customer ignorance.

I find all salespeople somewhat sad. They're a quiet suffering lot. Enforced happiness, over time it gives them a sort of sad smile, one that is almost entirely devoid of sincerity. While their customers are each and everyone unique, the salesperson must repeat the same lines over and over, the same words, the same poignant and self-flattering story. What must be even more disheartening is that the practiced litany of words is their own, their own invention, a demonstration of their craft, their contribution to the field of salesmanship. And yet, they always sound sort of inflexible, forced, falling flat as practiced sincerity. It's not like the customer service operator or the McDonald's clerk. The words of these distant kin of the floor furniture salesperson are not their own. They do not have to take credit for them, they don't have to read the face of their customers for rejuvenating approval. They can spit their trained words out as a challenge or roll them as sweet politeness, they can even effect an air of ironic disdain for the numbing robotic and manipulative nature of the scripts they're given, while casting a knowing glance over their words.

Today's rule: smile at a salesperson, tell him you like his tie.

Ranch House and Nietzsche's footnote

Two very exciting things: PBS's Texas Ranch House and a footnote.

It's very difficult to decide which of the two is the most exciting. Texas Ranch House was sublime, both horrendous in how it reminded me of how little I enjoy my occupation, usually, and how the Cooke family behaved on the show. Awesome, I'm always looking for little reminders that I dislike what I do, sometimes I will forget, and watching people suffer through an incredibly challenging physical and social atmosphere with only their own ingenuity and dumb luck to assist is a powerful reminder of my own softness and complacency. A healthy dose of self-contempt can go a long way towards transcendent joy. It just keeps you from taking yourself too seriously. Imagining that you're peeling away the layers of luxury and comfort that insulate you from "survival" seems like a healthy exercise. I'm so far removed from "survival" that the instinct only comes into play when I'm crossing a busy street on my bike.

But the Cookes. Wow. How twisted. They reminded me of both the the crazy people from Malibu that were a disaster on Frontier House and the family in Manor House. These shows are such effective morality plays on the selfreinforcing nature of corruption when it comes to power and class. So, Mr. Cooke was a jerk, but that's not all that surprising. I've observed in the last few election cycles that white men in the 40s and 50s can be very scary and mean (something I have to look forward to). But what is really frightening is the lady Macbeth and the adoring children. Dude sits on his porch and rips off his employees, or "drives a hard bargain," demonstrating that he has learned no humility at all even though his is an obvious failure at everything but managing to wake up every morning for 2 and a half months. So, his wife overhears his dealing. I'm thinking she's going to come out and give him what for. My wife would have said, "you're a jerk, and I divorce you." (Or at least, if you don't apologize I'll divorce you.)But Mrs. Cooke comes out and says, "wow, you're amazing, I'm really proud of you."

What?

It's almost as nuts as when the Malibu family on Frontier House enthusiastically demonstrated the anatomy of a complete break with reality by pulling the carcass of some obviously suicidal rabbit out of their freezer in their enormous mansion on the cliffs. They said it was evidence that the experts that rated their performance poor didn't know what they were talking about. The dead rabbit, apparently one of the kids had shot it in the yard (more likely the thing threw itself at the barrel of the gun), demonstrated that the family had what "it took to survive" the winter in Montana, South Dakota, or wherever they were.

The footnote. Newspapers, or more specifically, news, drives me a little crazy. I have very little interest in reading it except for once a week or so. I'm interested in much of the topics found in a newspaper, but I just can't bring myself to read it everyday. It doesn't seem useful, and I've justified this in the past by pointing out that the news is always the same. It's as though we have the same few stories, viz. war dead, attack, murder, rape, kidnap, economy up, economy down, sports team up, sports team down, celebrity foible, etc. that we rewrite everyday with a few new facts.

As it works out, this type of stuff occurs en masse every single day, so our news outlets pick particular ones to fill in the blanks on the newspaper page. Unless you're tied up personally in the facts, you will not remember those facts that are not critical, and the critical facts, for the general public could be summed up in a ticker tape entry like "murders, rapes, kidnaps occurred today." From our perspective that should be enough to indicate that there is a real problem out there that needs attention. But instead we focus in on one or two particular cases and engorge as much innuendo as our journalists can extract from a vary narrow set of unique facts, unique to the particular crime/situation.

Anyway, a footnote in a book I'm reading really resonated with me. The claim is that the development of a free press, and particularly, daily newspapers has achieved tremendous good for society, in any number of ways. However, the downside is mesmerization by the ephemeral. We become consumed by an obsession with new news; it must be produced daily. We blind ourselves with meaningless details that will be forgotten anyway, but we nonetheless permit it to consume our creative energy. And thus, we are exhausted, overstimulated, and miss the larger picture, the trends, what is really happening in the world.

Today's rule: to try and find something novel in the news, and see if I would still call it "news," or to apply for the next PBS reality series.

Trailer doors and Spanish as a Second Language

Today was a good day. Didn't start so well, however. My wife and I had a "discussion" in the street before I left this morning...peeling out on my bike, leaving all that responsibility behind, like a rolling stone, to freedom on the Capitol Crescent. Okay, not really. But we did "talk." Unfortunately for the rest of the neighborhood, it was very civil and quiet. An obverser might have noticed very little of interest. In retrospect, this is disappointing, there's something refreshing and reassuring about other people screaming in the street, and considering our Mississippi/Georgia roots, we could have relied on some powerful role models. In the mind of a Southerner like myself, happily suffering from bemusement, the street scene of public argument if followed by an agressive thump of a trailer door slammed shut, is savored like no other.

Today I had to confront my Spanish. I have a new pro bono client that speaks no English. Communicating with her is not that intimidating, commuicating with her in front of other Spanish/English speakers is a different matter. I've spent over two years living in Latin America or Spain over the last decade and feel comfortable saying that I'm a fluent Spanish speaker. What is uncomfortable, however, is demonstrating the fluency to others fluent in both languages. Because while it is true that I can understand and communicate my ideas, "fluid" is not an adjective that I would use to describe the process if another were available. And when forced to speak the language, to someone who doesn't speak English, you are fluent indeed. But when "practicing" your language skills with another English speaker, you stumble, mumble, and eventually just revert to English.

I've noticed that non-native, but technically fluent, speakers use various strategies to cope with their truncated speach. I've employed four, with varying degrees of success. First, act broody and pensive; it's not that you can't speak the language well, you just choose to be difficult to understand, cryptic. After all, you're just annoyed with language in general. Second, be completely unemotional about your language skills, and register no response when people correct you or you say something totally stupid. Third, speak your little heart out, throw caution to the wind and accept, with gusto, your role as clown. Fourth, just accept that you have an accent (to put it mildly) and get on with it.

Today's rule: attempt to stop apologizing for any lack of complete mastery of a foreign language.








Today's rules: before you commit to traveling to a client, look up their address on a map.

Talking to yourself so others can hear.

I've already forgotten yesterday. How is that possible? It was 24 solid hours of non-stop action of some variety. I vaguely remember talking to people, kissing my wife, feeling the urge to harm my neighbor's nutso dog (we're dog-sitting), and feeling confused and ambivalent about the United Postal Service. Filling in the blanks is hard. Where did it go? Maybe the fact that yesterday barely happened is because most of my day was filled by a one-way conversation(?) at Mark Edmundson. Perhaps talking to yourself about someone not present (and whom you've never met) with the whole world as a nonattentive audience is so bereft of importance that it simply never happens.

Some of it is coming back. Ah yes, I did record-time home on my bicycle. Absolutely sailing, blazing past the roadies in their weirdly colored, skin-tight uniforms and fancy bikes. The hybrid and an old bathing suit proved to be just as competitive. All the more so since no one knew we were racing, a very sneaky move on my part. It was a beautiful ride home next to the river, and it is somewhat of a thrill to come out on River Street with only other bike commuters before heading up the Capitol Crescent, leaving the cars, exhaust, horns, and most of the smog behind. The bike is a superior form of commute. There is no doubt about it.

Today's breakdown. More work. New glasses that will have to go back (not quite right). Immigration cases. Progress on the hip-openers, and serious reflection on what I'd have to give up to be a religious leader. Heteroskedasticity and the ratio of charisma to cost for my practice group as a predictive variable in rainmaking.

Today's rule: find a way to employ clicker training into my relationships at work.

Idle Hands.

Today work found me. They say that "idle hands do the devil's work," and this job is clear proof of the inaccuracy of that old aphorism. My idle hands were typing overwrought blog entries. Anything but the devil's work. Unless the devil is a pudgy feeling pseudo-intellectual slouching before a computer who loves to type inane diary entries that only his wife reads. (I have no doubt, however, that the devil is a lawyer, remembering Job's "advocate.") Nor do I believe that turning the pages in books and articles, surfing through listings for used kayaks, and drumming up pro bono work is the devil's work. However, my hands are now less idle; I have been given work. And I am now much less confident about who's work I am doing.

This weekend, while Amy was away, I helped build a roof for a little old lady's back porch. Friday, I relearned trig and designed the little roof, drew little diagrams on Word, downloaded some trig tables from NASA. The next morning I was "team leader" for a bunch of guys with varying carpentry skills. Fortunately, a couple of the guys had more skills than I, and unfortunately, a couple more had less experience, but as much confidence as I did.

I learned: (1) a porch roof can built solely on determination; (2) saying no to a suggested change to your plan is easier when the suggester introduces himself as "Sasquatch" (even if he does have obvious skills with a pneumatic nail gun); (3) ask the quiet guy who works hard what he thinks (turns out he's an expert in porch roofs, but too nice to tell you that you're an idiot); (4) assume that your project will take all the time that's available to you, regardless of its complexity; and (5) preachers should avoid building metaphors in the blessing that starts a day of charitable home repair.

Today's rule: savor every Christopher Guest moment that the world throws your way, and if everyone is acting too reasonably, don't be afraid to be the hero and act like an idiot.

Freud, Zen, and College Hedonism

Still slow. In an effort to speed the day up, I've indulged myself with "professional reading." The term is one of art, and it actually means, "writing that remains unread, but that inhabits lists entitled, 'things to read.'"

Edmundson and Perrin. Today, I read a fascinating article by Mark Edmundson, a very cool sounding (I believe he would find the description insulting) professor at the University of Virginia. "Very cool sounding" because his breadth of work seems fascinatingly eclectic, like that of the late Noel Perrin. Perrin wrote "Giving up the Gun," one of my very favorite books, "favorite" mostly by virtue of the fact that it is short and I have successfully remembered its title over the years. Otherwise, my only other contact with the author's genius was NPR's obituary which sketched a picture of his range. Enough to satisfy me that he was a genius, a wild mind undisciplined by "discipline." In my weaker moments, I like to flatter myself that I also enjoy such breadth of interest and generally applicable tools of intellectual penetration, but admittedly on a more blue collar level.

Mark Edmundson. I think I'll call him Mark. Mark is a literary theorist who, apparently (because who could really be sure?), made himself a little famous by being brilliant, or at least by demonstrating the gift of gab while simultaneously showing an enthusiasm for the genius of others and a keen ability to identify it (this is my way of saying that he's written books about other people). He is a dangerous person, because literary theorists (LTs) are dangerous people. For one thing, they give Conservative "intellectuals" fodder for their "war on Christmasianity" tirades, or whatever they are calling it now. Literary theorists work in a very difficult theoretical environment, and like plaintiff's attorneys, sometimes the world provides them with work, and sometimes you have to make the pig to get some bacon. After all, new literature is produced by folks who have been trained, often either directly or at least indirectly, in the interpretation of past literature by literary theorists. Thus, before you write literature, you learn what good literature is; I imagine that this may dampen the creation of really new, crazy stuff to theorize about. The LTs have to really get creative about the re-interpretation of older stuff. Moreover, consider that their raw material is such a flexible pile of words already barely catching hold of the reality they are meant to describe. The danger lies in that LTs help pull undiscovered meanings out of static texts, but then those techniques are fatuously applied to dynamic real world stories, often by folks interested more in debunking the education system from which they come than with the value of certain theories as literary theories. I'd provide examples, but then I'd move beyond my level of expertise.

Freud and Zen. Mark's article in the New York Times magazine was sort of teaser for his new book on Freud. He seems to be pushing Freud as a guru advocating the value of societal discord as reflecting a potentially Zen-like state-of-being (according to the common definition of Zen: "cool, or at least perplexing enough to suspend contemplation"). Our id and superego battle it out, our exhausted ego mediates whenever it can glean information from our erratic behavior, and this is the natural state, the way things probably should be. If Mark was to attempt to be a self-help best selling author, his sound byte would have to be "Confused and Unhappy? Good." And maybe he'd be right, maybe being confused and unhappy is the emotional equivalent of eating organic.

Liberal Education. The google revealed to me that Mark is also the author of a very read, or at least distributed, article called "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As lite Entertainment for Bored College Students."(http://www.student.virginia.edu/~decweb/lite/) It should not be distilled down to one major theme or conclusion, because it is actually subtle and interesting, at times contradictory (or at least I think so). But if it were to be so summed, I might offer that Mark's thesis is: "consumer culture has sapped our students of any potential intellectual vigor/rigor while forcing the evolution of universities from boring repressive institutions into fun, candylands where teens get to safely play out their self-absorbed fantasizing of intellectual vigor/rigor." Definitely worth a read. Oh, and it's very funny. Sorry, Mark.

But before I take on Mark's ideas, I should lay out my own qualifications. I have only one, viz. eleven years of higher education. And sadly, never in a Ph.D. program. This means that almost all those semesters I was taking classes, a full complement. I was down in the trenches mucking it out with the other students. So, I've seen a lot of professors in action, at several different institutions. In other words, I'm potentially a professor's nightmare, an experienced student with no teaching experience, and thus no compassion for her plight.

Mark wrote this in 1997, one year before I graduated from Sewanee. Probably too late for it to be an assigned reading for me. That's too bad, because it's a nice window into the professor's mind. Reading it may have helped me identify good professors from the bad, and given me justification for displaying some intellectual curiosity, overcoming my fear of not appearing "cool" (sadly, a lost cause anyway). Mark's article is a sort of impassioned cry of the oppressed, appealing to the unknowing oppressor, viz. the student.

Fear and created need (in marketing of consumer products) are important themes in the development of the modern university as he tells it, as is depression. Very interesting, but I want to respond to something else.

For some measure of self-dislike, or self-discontent -- which is much different than simple depression -- seems to me to be a prerequisite for getting an education that matters. My students, alas, usually lack the confidence to acknowledge what would be their most precious asset for learning: their ignorance.

A culture of ignorance of ignorance (is that possible?). A consumer culture that creates unfounded confidence only in our capacity to understand what we need? But Mark may have erred in concluding that this a problem. A conclusion that he will later find further evidence for in Freud's interpretation of allegiance to charismatic leaders as a replacement for
the super-ego, i.e. that discord and confusion may be a psychological and social good. But is this a little shrill, a little too much Huxley? Why not let our universities turn into amusement parks? They are, after all, much larger institutions, catering to a much broader constituency, than ever before. My guess, I'm not a historian (I know it shows), is that there has never been a
golden age in which the public was an enlightened mass of enthusiastic skeptics that were in eager pursuit of some unifying world-view, slapping each other on the back along the way.

Generally the goal has always been comfort, right? And why shouldn't it be? After all, those of us suffering from intellectual discontent will sift through the pleasure filters and suffer a vocation directed at the either picking at our emotional/intellectual wounds or curing them. Why shouldn't everyone else just enjoy life?

But assuming that we believe that sophisticated worldly people are happier, or value life more, etc. Smart students willing to learn, willing to open their minds beyond their past experience, are put in an impossible position when they start at a university. The intellectually curious students often don't perform, or seem to shirk their academic responsibilities. But what are they to do? Studying hard would merely be conforming to another set of rules. How are they to know that their professors are attempting to liberate them? How could they know? How might they be "good" students until they've lived a little?

Students come to school needing to shed so much cultural filth as it is, and on top of that they must worry about disappointing professors who want immediate discipline? Perhaps their hedonistic embrace of irony (and hints of nihilism) is a necessary retreat to a new place of beginning. Those students that do perform at some satisfactory level seem to fall in one of three categories: (1) those lucky ones whose intellectual motivation matches that of the teacher; (2) the submissive sycophant; and (3) those who are strategic about the endgame (decent grades) and bright enough to play to the professor's needs (or to count on low expectations) while reserving the rest of their time to social experimentation and discovering their ignorance on their own (without it becoming some other bit of wisdom fed to them by an authority figure).

Mark (as I read him) suggests the solution lies partly in professors that are authentically rough, open to new ideas, but committed to a particular worldview. Professors with a strong sense of self easily communicated to their audience can create a space safe enough to permit intellectual combat and growth. They must be passionate, they must be eccentric, anything but "cool." They must be willing to judge, but only within the modest realm of their competency. Sounds good to me. But an awareness of ignorance imposed by a dialectical process couldn't be empowering. How does the university and the teachers create some safe place for that sort of mystical truth about one's ignorance, one's place in the universe, to expose itself to the student?

Today's rule: not worry about whether today's blog was really worth writing, but do consider whether it would be worth writing again.