Occasional thoughts on what's current, twisted into words by all that's gone before.
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A drop of rain here, a drop of rain there, @chulavet don’t care. She brought her best legs.
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ANGEL WINGS My dogs and I came upon this tire, sad and frustrated, standing amid several efforts to make angel wings in the asphalt. "I'm not a snow tire," it told us, "so I'm trying to work in my natural element. I need more practice. I'm getting better, but I'm so... tired."
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BASKET. LAUNDRY. LITTLE DOG.
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Not Just a Student, But Also a Voter
"Photoshop did something weird; it doesn't work the way you said it would," said one of my students in a Photoshop class.
True, I'm not always right about how Photoshop works. I'm not always right about how ANYTHING works. But every other student in the class got the expected result.
"Well, let's see what you did that's different or perhaps you did it wrong," I replied as I headed for his workstation. "No way," he averred, "I did it exactly according to instructions."
I performed the operation according to instructions and got the predicted result. "That's what I did," he insisted, "and it came out wrong."
I performed the operation from a slightly erroneous starting point. I got his result. "No, I'm sure I didn't start that way," he maintained.
I repeated the processes a couple more times. Same results.
Me: "So if I repeatedly do it one way and get the predicted result, and I repeatedly do it another way and get YOUR result, you still believe Photoshop is at fault here?"
Student: "Yes."
Me: "Do you usually vote in elections?"
Student: "Yes, why?"
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How He Learned to Drive
About 21 years ago I helped teach my son to drive. To this day he reminds me how terrified he was during those adventures. A terror, by the way, of which I was blissfully and completely unaware at the time.
There was a goal for me: Exceed minimums. Hey, passing the driver test at the DMV is a noble goal, of course. Staying alive after getting one's license is, to my mind, even more worthy.
So in addition to rehearsing the gentle crawls through the streets around the DMV -- the turf upon which the driver test will torture the lad -- I recalled my own youthful thrill of being a new driver.
Almost as soon as I got my license I drove into Boston to take a look around. Have you driven in Boston? Have you heard the stories about Boston drivers? Can you imagine the hubris of a teenager with a brand new license throwing himself into such a cauldron? Oh, sorry, of course you, too, were once a teenager.
Assuming my son would suffer the same near-universal convulsion of teenage stupidity, I attempted to prepare him for it. I directed him to the freeway. I coached him through his first on-ramp experience, then took him off the freeway at the next off-ramp. Then returned to the freeway, then off the freeway. Merge-exit-merge-exit, over and over and over.
The freeway gods even pitched in, offering their own adventure. On our way to the next off-ramp a trailerless tractor -- you know, the engine-and-driver part of an 18-wheeler -- went completely out of control just ahead of us. It slid sideways, tires smoking, then started sliding around in circles.
I coached my son in pumping the brake, changing lanes to avoid the rig now balanced precariously over guardrails, tires still spinning and smoking. All safe. Well done, son.
In a lesson soon after the freeway drills, we went to San Francisco to learn how to stop, start, and parallel park on the nastiest hills in The City. Part of getting to those hills and back home from those hills is, obviously, navigating city traffic.
San Francisco traffic is a piece of brie compared to Boston. But my son had never seen Boston traffic, so dismissing his concerns with the comparison between the two cities helped not a whit.
Those adventures remain close to the surface of his regard for me, even now. Yes, he laughs as he tells the stories, but it is a vaguely nasty, sardonic laugh. Perhaps I deserve his disdain; I may have been premature in his immersion.
Oh, by the way, he and his lovely wife now have 2 sons. One an infant, a babe in arms; the other is 2 years old. Sons, yes. In 14 years my son will get to revisit my motives from a completely different point of view. And then again, 2 short years later.
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Faith Among The Imperious
"End Times" proclamations are not just delusions. Voicing such a belief reveals much more than a hyperventilating imagination -- it betrays in the speaker a selfishness and overweening self-importance on a truly grand scale.
You see, to believe that God is about to put the big termite tent over planet earth and exterminate us all is also, necessarily, to believe "my generation" is THE blessed generation. It is for "US" (or more accurately, ME and my friends) that God was waiting.
"My work here is done," God is telling them inside their heads. "You, my child, are as good as it gets."
But there's more. The end-timer is convinced not only of the quintessential sweetness of his or her own eternal soul, as above, but is convinced also that those outside his or her belief system are the most depraved and despised-by-God posse since the Great Flood.
So simultaneously the end-timer is inflating self-importance to dirigible proportions while looking at the rest of us as the lowest crab lice in history. And, wow, it will be SUCH a pleasure to see the Lord's clouds of DDT sifting down from the heavens, setting us to tortured writhing.\, then death, and finally damnation everlasting.
Oh, and by the way, I have a theory about a major expectation the end-timer is cherishing. The end-timer expects to witness, during the gentle ascent to the right hand of God, the horrified agonies of the damned. Namely, all those who have pissed off the end-timer one way or another during their stint on terra firma.
End-timers want and expect to see us sinners burned at the stake, slowly, over fires just large enough to char the flesh but not enough to kill the sinner too quickly. As in Joan of Arc's suffering, only we're damned, not canonized.
How savory will be the end-timer's taste of revenge, basking in the triumph of God's chosen, and better yet, seeing the longing gaze of us sinners as we cry out, "You were right! You were right all along! I see that now!"
Then, with a body-wrenching fist pump, screaming "YESSSSSS" the end-timer cadre will jump aboard their heaven-bound golden Escalades and merge onto the Highway to Heaven.
Next time you see anybody flirting with end time ideas, you'll know -- they feel really smug inside, superior, and you, you're just crab lice.
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