Just wanted to get a little something out. Feeling a smidge homesick, especially for Fairfield. Got a book on how to handle crazy college workload. I'm hopeful it will help somewhat, though setting up the habits and routines is taking more time upfront. But it was a quick read because only a few part's applied strongly to me, and it seems like generally good advice. Not great, but good enough to work with and modify to my own needs. And learning the skills to do that will be nicely applicable to the rest of life. Basically, I'm trying to learn how to get a lot of stuff done well without working 24/7 and burning out.
I love haveing huge quiet part that is a 7-minute bike ride from my house. I go for walks most mornings and the beauty is often stunning. A few days ago I saw a beam of light piercing through the V of a tree, it's whole length illumined in the morning mist, rain droplets falling and floating down into existence and back out hypnotically, and then I noticed my breath fogged into the beam and turned to a muted rainbow as it curled and spiraled through the light in pleasing rounded shapes. I stood there, breathing misty fractal rainbows into the sunbeam until it disappeared because the sun moved, and I was dizzy, either with the beauty, or because I was mildly hyperventilating while breathing into the sunbeam. Maybe both.
This is the kind of set-up I want for my permanent abode. I thought it was true, and I have confirmed it. I am super happy when I am near really pretty, fairly undisturbed nature that I have easy walking access to. And I guess I like the mixture of small town and lots of stuff going on that a college town provides. This is good. I'm starting to hone in on location parameters for where I might like to live long-term. I'll find out if I'm ok with the winters soon.
I O
Sunday, September 25, 2016
Saturday, September 17, 2016
A little is a lot better than none
And it is this philosophy (the title) that makes me write something, thought I don't have time for anything long, well planned, or properly edited. Hello dear friends, Romans, and countrymen. I think of many of you often with love, and wish I could sit and have tea and crumpets with you in person.
Graduate school is (and this should come as no surprise) a huge quantity of reading and homework. I was behind and am now finally almost caught up. However I'm saying goodbye to my Manhatten SSE students, which means about 10 hours of driving and taking the train, all told, to get there from Keene, New Hampshire and back again.
I also needed to switch out the car I was using (my dad's Subaru) for my car (my mom's old car) and pick up any stuff that I'd wished I'd had over the last few weeks. In any case, travel is not just a lot of time, it's also a lot of energy, so I've got to make good use of this trip, since I don't know how often I'll be able to make it. Especially since this crazy semester is going to be the LIGHTEST one. It will be fine, I just need to reacquaint and refine my somewhat disused academic skills and get better at doing a 'good enough' job on projects that are less important. Without a time-turner it is the only way I can figure out. I've been learning all this time, but the way you learn in school is different and much more paper heavy than the way you learn in real life.
Which is interesting and perhaps something I should note, as a future teacher.
Much love to you all. Here is a picture of a very cute cat in the bed of some friends I met in New York.
^_^
Isaac
Thursday, September 8, 2016
Rain Day
This post is going to be longer than it should be. It needs to be super short, because I have MONDO amounts of work to do. In general, and in specific, tonight and tomorrow morning. Graduate school is a lot of work, especially until I find the right balance of skimming to comprehension.
Anyhoo, on to the story.
My old car (now in the hands of a good friend.) seemed to have a curse associated with it: Whenever I would forget to roll up the windows, it would rain. The frequency and correlation if this ended up making some of the inner paneling fall off, the glue molded away from all the times it got wet right by the windows.
At first I was angry, thinking the universe was taunting me, but I quickly decided to look at it more as a playful and harmless prank. The universe trying to make my life a little more interesting and funny. At some point, I realized it worked so well, that I would occasionally leave my windows open on purpose, when there was a bad drought going on, to tease the rain out, so to speak. It always made me laugh, of often and quickly it seemed to work. (though it would often wait just long enough that I was distracted and the car got nicely wet.
Eventually I learned my lesson and rarely to never left the windows down, even during hot days.
Just tonight though, I was thinking about this power my car seemed to have, and how where I'm living now has been going through a drought. Perhaps one of it's worst in recorded history. The tree's were starting to suffer and show bad signs. There was a newspaper article about the leaves turning for fall, more prematurely than ever before, because of the drought. So, I decided to bring the rain. Or at least give it a shot.
Kind of like some kind of modern rain dance ceremony, I purposefully left the car window down (not my old car anymore, one I was borrowing from my parents.) the fact that the car would get kind of wet seemed like the sacrifice made, the lowering of the window was the ritual. Then I forgot about it, and went to work on my massive pile of reading. And then, just now, I heard rain, for the first time since I'd moved there. I quickly went down, to close the car window (don't worry dad, it was only open a little bit for a short time) and, with a prayer that it keep raining even though I was closing the windows, I rolled them back up. (generally, the longer my windows were down in the rain before I rolled them up, the heavier the rain.)
I don't have a good explanation for why that happened.
I'm kind of entertained at the thought that people who don't believe in a benevolent intelligence to the universe (which I call God) could probably do some math and prove that it was just probability and my brain seeing patterns where there weren't any.
It's amazing to me how flexible the universe seems to be. For the most part, you can have wildly different world views, and the universe allows you to keep believing the one you want.
In any case, as far as I'm concerned, It's magic, and it's the universe acting like a playful puppy, as it sometimes does. Though that still doesn't really describe the why. It feels like there is an underlying order to it, but what it is, I can't grasp, and don't have the tools to experiment and figure it out quickly. But it is one of my long-term goals.
OK, that's all I have time for and more. Graduate school is teaching me what it's like to repeatedly be unable to finish all my homework satisfactorily. Hopefully this next week will be better since I've got more time and more of an idea of how long it takes. (and more of an idea of what level of textual analysis is expected.)
See ya ^_^
I
Anyhoo, on to the story.
My old car (now in the hands of a good friend.) seemed to have a curse associated with it: Whenever I would forget to roll up the windows, it would rain. The frequency and correlation if this ended up making some of the inner paneling fall off, the glue molded away from all the times it got wet right by the windows.
At first I was angry, thinking the universe was taunting me, but I quickly decided to look at it more as a playful and harmless prank. The universe trying to make my life a little more interesting and funny. At some point, I realized it worked so well, that I would occasionally leave my windows open on purpose, when there was a bad drought going on, to tease the rain out, so to speak. It always made me laugh, of often and quickly it seemed to work. (though it would often wait just long enough that I was distracted and the car got nicely wet.
Eventually I learned my lesson and rarely to never left the windows down, even during hot days.
Just tonight though, I was thinking about this power my car seemed to have, and how where I'm living now has been going through a drought. Perhaps one of it's worst in recorded history. The tree's were starting to suffer and show bad signs. There was a newspaper article about the leaves turning for fall, more prematurely than ever before, because of the drought. So, I decided to bring the rain. Or at least give it a shot.
Kind of like some kind of modern rain dance ceremony, I purposefully left the car window down (not my old car anymore, one I was borrowing from my parents.) the fact that the car would get kind of wet seemed like the sacrifice made, the lowering of the window was the ritual. Then I forgot about it, and went to work on my massive pile of reading. And then, just now, I heard rain, for the first time since I'd moved there. I quickly went down, to close the car window (don't worry dad, it was only open a little bit for a short time) and, with a prayer that it keep raining even though I was closing the windows, I rolled them back up. (generally, the longer my windows were down in the rain before I rolled them up, the heavier the rain.)
I don't have a good explanation for why that happened.
I'm kind of entertained at the thought that people who don't believe in a benevolent intelligence to the universe (which I call God) could probably do some math and prove that it was just probability and my brain seeing patterns where there weren't any.
It's amazing to me how flexible the universe seems to be. For the most part, you can have wildly different world views, and the universe allows you to keep believing the one you want.
In any case, as far as I'm concerned, It's magic, and it's the universe acting like a playful puppy, as it sometimes does. Though that still doesn't really describe the why. It feels like there is an underlying order to it, but what it is, I can't grasp, and don't have the tools to experiment and figure it out quickly. But it is one of my long-term goals.
OK, that's all I have time for and more. Graduate school is teaching me what it's like to repeatedly be unable to finish all my homework satisfactorily. Hopefully this next week will be better since I've got more time and more of an idea of how long it takes. (and more of an idea of what level of textual analysis is expected.)
See ya ^_^
I
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