This edition makes a full year I have been writing a weekly blog. I have enjoyed it most of them time as I hope you have. It is remarkable how fast some weeks go and others how long they drag. I have read that time passes more quickly for those stuck in routines with little variation in their day to day. That rings true to me as the years where I have been busy but have done new things have seemed longer and fuller.
The hope for my next life stage is that there will be variety and challenge without monotony. Despite the differences in the personalities and faces in front of you, when you teach long enough you get to know your curriculum very well. And textbooks off by heart. And then there are the bells. Teachers and coaches are always running to the sound of the bell. It will be nice to get out from underneath that regime, for a while anyway.
We lost our playoff baseball game this week. Baseball can be an ugly and stupid sport at times. You can have players with no ability or respect for their opponents who can raise their arms in triumph because a ball ticked off their sleeve while they were standing at the plate with the bases loaded. You can do everything right and hit a line drive right at someone for an out in a close game. The rewards are often not earned by the worthy. But I guess if you can’t pitch, you can’t play and baseball is 80% pitching, trust me. We couldn’t throw strikes and now we are done.
I don’t recall if I have referred to this article before but have a read and be very afraid. Maybe. My reticence to believe this ominous theory comes from the fact that despite the seeming inevitability of the coming Artificial Intelligence revolution, this warning echoes so many other predictions of rampant technological change. Where is my flying car? And moon base to visit? And one-hour flight to Tokyo? Intelligent android butler anyone? All of these were predicted with certainty 50 years ago, and still we wait to see the moon inhabited, and we sit in traffic jams and in airports. And I have to make my own bed.
I misplaced my knapsack twice this week. Panic ensued almost immediately as there are approximately 40,000 handwritten words of book number three in there. Perhaps I will take a picture of every completed page from now on. Either that, or I should get typing!
I continue to read ‘Paris in the Present Tense’ by Mark Helprin. It is so good that it seems there is no more important thing that a person could choose to do than to do just that. Read it.
Here is some of my prose (inadequate though it is in comparison):
It wasn’t much. Three crowns, win or lose. But Rasede was hungry and the split skin on the middle knuckle of his left hand had scabbed over hard. He owed rent on the room he was staying in. And the landlord used a long black wooden club to roust those who didn’t pay on time. Rasede had seen him use it. The fight was better than getting hit by that club.
Have a great week!