Life...

"Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there-& all the time they'll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry & betray time with urgencies false & otherwise, purely anxious & whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established & proven worry & having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit & go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, & all the time it all flies by them & they know it & that TOO worries them to no end."

-On the Road, Jack Kerouac

The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

What a great read. Great movie too (Elegy)

From, The Dying Animal

The main character's son, a college senior, gets a classmate pregnant, and goes to his father for advice....his father's reply:

"I reminded him that nobody could make him do what he didn't want to do. I said what I wished some forceful man had said to me when I was on the brink of making my mistake. I said, 'Living in a country like ours, whose key documents are all about emancipation, all directed at guaranteeing individual liberty, living in a free system that is basically indifferent to how you behave as long as the behavior is lawful, the misery that comes your way is most likely to be self-generated. It would be another matter if you were living in Nazi-occupied Europe or in Communist-dominated Europe or in Mae Zedong's China. There they manufacture the misery for you; you don't have to take a single wrong step in order never to want to get up in the morning. But here, free of totalitarianism, a man like you has to provide himself his own misery. You, moreover, are intelligent, articulate, good-looking, well educated--you are made to thrive in a country like this one. Here the only tyrant lying in wait will be convention, which is not to be taken lightly either. Read Tocqueville, if you haven't yet. He's not outdated, not on the subject of 'men being forced through the same sieve.' The point is that you shouldn't think that you miraculously have to become a beatnik or a bohemian or a hippie to elude the the trammels of convention. Successfully doing so doesn't require exaggerations of conduct or oddities of dress that are alien to your temperament and your upbringing. Not at all. All you have to do, Ken, is to find your force. You have it, I know you have it--it is immobilized only by the newness of the predicament. If you want to live intelligently beyond the blackmail of the slogans and the unexamined rules, you have only to find your own...' Et cetera, et cetera. The Declaration of Independence. The Bill of Rights. The Gettysburg Address. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth Amendment. All three of the Civil War amendments...

I know all the objections that a pure and moral young man can give to claiming personal sovereignty. I know all the admirable labels to attach to not asserting one's sovereignty. Well, Kenny's difficulty is that he must be admirable whatever the cost. He lives in fear of a woman telling him he's not. "Selfish" is the word that cripples him. You selfish bastard. He's terrified of that judgment, so that's the judgment that rules."

le voyageur de l'esprit

at the intersection of pompous and genius
at the corner of pretention and philosophy
(judgement in the mind of the beholder)
where postulations undulate
and books' breathe contented sighs
romance in the flourish of a pencil
lead appears as love on another full page
a blooming not in soil but in skull
a synapse's spark
lighting the candle
that burns midnight's oil
and illuminates the map
when thought becomes a journey,
journey becomes a thought.
destination is discovery
untouched grounds
founded in freedom
experience untouched
save for one.























for roo

Funny 'cuz its True

More Bill Bryson from The Lost Continent

"Having gone without dinner the night before, I intended to indulge myself in that greatest of all American gustatory pleasures - going out for Sunday breakfast.

Everybody in America goes out for Sunday breakfast. It is such a popular pastime that you generally have to line up for a table, but it's always worth the wait. Indeed, the inability to achieve instant oral gratification is such an unusual experience in America that lining up actually intensifies the pleasure. You wouldn't want to do it all the time, of course, you wouldn't want to get British about it or anything, but once a week for twenty minutes is "kinda neat," as they say. One reason you have to line up is that it take the waitress about thirty minutes just to take each order. First you have to tell her whether you want your eggs sunny-side up, over easy, scrambled, poached, parboiled, or in an omelette, and in an omelette, whether you want it to be a plain, cheese, vegetable, hot-spicy, or chocolate nut 'n' fudge omelette; and then you have to decide whether you want your toast on white, rye, whole wheat, sourdough, or pumpernickel bread and whether you want whipped butter, pat butter, or low-cholesterol butter substitute; and then there's a complicated period of negotiation in which you ask if you can have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll and link sausages instead of patties. So the waitress, who is only sixteen years old and not real smart, has to go off to the manager and ask him whether that's possible, and she comes back and tells you that you can't have cornflakes instead of the cinnamon roll, but you can have Idaho frieds instead of the short stack of pancakes, or you can have an English muffin and bacon instead of whole wheat toast, but only if you order a side of hashed browns and a large orange juice. This is unacceptable to you, and you decide that you will have waffles instead, so the waitress has to rub everything out with her nubby eraser and start all over again. And across the room the line on the other side of the "Please Wait to Be Seated" board grows longer and longer, but the people don't mind because the food smells so good and, anyway, all this waiting is, as I say, kinda neat."

The Lost Continent 2

One more, because this one deserves an entry of its own, haha!

...inside a Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant...
"We were ushered into the dining room with nine strangers and all seated together at one big trestle table.
There must have been fifty other such tables in the room...
I've never seen so much food. I couldn't see over the top of my plate. It was all delicious...I ate so much my armpits bulged. But still the food kept coming. Just when I thought I would have to summon a wheelchair to get me to the car, the waitress took away all the platters and bowls, and started bringing desserts--apple pies, chocolate pies, bowls of home-made ice cream, pastries, flans and God knows what else.
I kept eating. It was too delicious to pass up. Buttons popped off my shirt; my trousers burst open. I barely had the strength to lift my spoon, but I kept shoveling the stuff in. It was grotesque. Food began to leak from my ears. And still I ate. I ate more food that night than some African villagers eat in a lifetime. Eventually, mercifully, the waitress prised the spoons out of our hands and took the dessert stuff away, and we were able to stumble zombielike out into the night.
We got into the car, too full to speak...I felt as if I had eaten the contents of a cement mixer. I lay on the back seat of the car, my feet in the air, and moaned softly. I vowed that I would never eat again, and meant it. But two hours later, when we arrived back at my brother's house, the agony had abated and my brother and I were able to begin a new cycle of gross overconsumption, beginning with a twelve-pack of beer and bucket of pretzels from his kitchen and concluding, in the early hours of the evening, with a plate of onion rings and two-foot-long submarine sandwiches, full of goo and spices, at an all-night eatery out on Highway 11."

-The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

The Lost Continent

Bill Bryson is amazing. I can't wait to read all of his other books. I'm not quite done with this one, but wanted to share so of the best passages so far. His wit, sarcasm, and ebb and flow in pace are ideal for a book like this. If you've ever taken, or ever WANTED to take a cross country road trip, please read it. Being someone that has done that, it was exciting to read how his take on various places, like the Grand Canyon, were almost my words exactly for describing the experience, suggesting something very undeniable and universally moving about the oddities and beauties of the United States.

"The last time I had been in New York was when I was sixteen and my friend Stan and I came out to visit my brother and his wife, who were living there then. They had an apartment in a strange, Kafkaesque apartment complex in Queens called Lefrak City. It consisted of about a dozen identical tall, featureless buildings clustered around a series of lonesome quadrangles, the sort of quadrangles where rain puddles stand for weeks and the flowerbeds are littered with supermarket carts. Each building was like a vertical city, with its own grocery store, drugstore, laundromat and so on. I don't remember the details except that each building was taller than the tallest building in Des Moines and that the total population was something like 50,000--bigger than most Iowa towns. I had never conceived of so many people gathered in one place. I couldn't understand why in such a big, open, country as America people would choose to live like that. It wasn't as if this were something temporary, a place to spend a few months while waiting for their ranch house in the suburbs to be built. This was home. This was it. Thousands and thousands of people would live out their lives never having their own backyard, never having a barbecue, never stepping out the back door at midnight to have a pee in the bushes and check out the stars. Their children would grow up thinking that supermarket carts grew wild, like weeds."

and in Vermont...
"One village I went through had about four stores and one of them was a Ralph Lauren Polo Shop. I couldn't think of anything worse than living in a place where you could buy a$200 sweater but not a can of baked beans. Actually, I could think of a lot of worse things--cancer of the brain, watching every episode of a TV miniseries starring Joan Collins, having to eat at a Burger Chef more than twice in one year, reaching for a glass of water in the middle of the night and finding that you've just taken a drink from your grandmother's denture cup, and so on. But I think you get my point."

and in Amish country...
"Travel articles and movies like Witness generally gloss over this side of things, but the fact is that Lancaster County is now one of the most awful places in America, especially on weekends when traffic jams sometimes stretch for miles. Many of the Amish themselves have given up and moved to places like Iowa and upper Michigan where they are left alone. Out in the countryside, particularly on the back roads, you can still sometimes see the people in their funny dark clothes working in the fields or driving their distinctive black buggies down the highway, with a long line of tourist cars creeping along behind, pissed off because they can't get by and they really want to be in a Bird in Hand so that they can get some more funnel cakes and SnoCones and perhaps buy a wrought-iron wine rack or combination mailbox-weather vane to take back home to Fartville with them. I wouldn't be surprised if a decade from now there isn't a real Amish person left in the country."

-The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson

textbook excitement

Certainly can't recall ever being as exciting about a textbook as I was when I read this:

The old adage "You get out of it only what you put into it" aptly describes a cognitive perspective. Some students approach learning in passive and "shallow" ways, either failing to engage fully or relying heavily on rote memorization. Both cognitive research and our experience as educators tell us that the resultant learning is likely to be both superficial and transitory. In contrast, other students' attempts at learning clearly are aimed at deeper understanding; they relate new information to what they already know, organize it, and regularly check their comprehension.

-Cognitive Psychology and Instruction, by Roger H. Bruning (Author), Gregg J. Schraw (Author), Monica M. Norby (Author), Royce R. Ronning (Author)

Eat Pray Love quotes

"...it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."
-reference to the Bhagavad Gita from "Eat, Pray, Love"

"To create a family with a spouse is one of the most fundamental ways a person can find continuity and meaning in American (or any) society. I rediscover this truth every time I go to a big reunion of my mother's family in Minnesota and I see how everyone is held so reassuringly in their positions over the years. First you are a child, then you are a teenager, then you are a young married person, then you are a parent, then you are retired, then you are a grandparent-at every stage you know who you are, you know what your duty is and you know where to sit at the reunion. You sit with the other children, or teenagers, or young parents, or retirees. Until at last you are sitting with the ninety-year-olds in the shade, watching over your progeny with satisfaction. Who are you? No problem-you're the person who created all this. The satisfaction of this knowledge is immediate, and moreover, it's universally recognized. How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It's the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy-If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well."
-Eat, Pray, Love

Massachusetts

The sun slid down behind the Tappan Zee, and I slid down the Atlantic Coast.
My GPS and cell phone batteries drained, as were my own.
One last beautiful 287 sky allowed me the peace of mind to reflect on my visit up north.
It was so great to see Grampa, and I had such a fun, liberating drive up; it was so great to see him with his two dogs who keep him young. But goodbyes get harder as loved ones get older, and the lump in my throat was forming the night before; the cold firm grip that reality has on my jaw, holding my face in place, so I have to look and can't squirm away from the examination of our eventual, inescapable, everlooming mortality.
Reading helps, of course - did you know "hobo" is short for HOmeward BOund? - in that its both a satisfying experience for my brain, in that its an escape, but also a productive commentary on the shadows cast over the day...

When you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness; it is your duty (and also you entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight
-Eat, Pray, Love

summer magic

"It made me think that everything was about to arrive-the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever."

-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

.what i decided forever was that nothing should be decided forever.

...directionless part two...

"The American Dream is for immigrants. The rest of us are better acquainted with entitlement or boredom than we are with our own survival mechanisms. And when confronted with a fight-or-flight scenario, the latter usually takes precedence. Escape is our action of choice: escape through pharmaceuticals, escape through technology, and plain old running away in search of something else, anything else...

I continually revisit the words of some sociologist who I read in college. I think that is was Weber or Durkheim...He believed that the modern mind is determined to expand its repertoire or experiences, and is bent on avoiding any specialization that threatens to interrupt the search for alternatives and novelty. Many people would call that approach to life a crisis, immaturity, or being out of touch with reality. It could also be called the New American Dream. [Screw] the simple pursuit of financial stability. Here's to finding fulfillment in novelty, excitement, adventure, and autonomy."

-Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, Thomas B Kohnstamm

directionless postcollegiate life

"...With such a character-defining foothold in the career world, I no longer have to make excuses for the life I lead. No longer do I have to explain my directionless postcollegiate life to incredulous eyes and repetitive questions, like: "What are you doing next year?" "Don't you want to do something with your life?" and my favorite, "When are you going to get a real job?" I am no longer just Thomas, the supposed slacker, backpacker bum, or permanent student. I am Thomas, the employee of ________, ________, ________ & _________ LLP, and I am going places.

I make more money than I reasonably should, putting papers into chronological order (chroning, in office-speak). My skill set also includes entering numbers into Excel spreadsheets and working the copier and fax machine. Between those projects, I search for old high school friends' names on Google; play online Jeopardy against my office trivia nemesis, Jerry; and generally while away the hours of my life...

Yes, I know, I really have it pretty good. There are people starving in Africa. And there are plenty of people here in New York who would love the chance to be in a cubicle all day and not have to operate deep-fat fryers, drive garbage trucks... or whatever it is they do. The problem is that I am an ungrateful by-product of a prosperous society -- the offal of opportunity. I am just another liberal arts graduate who bought the idea that life and career would be a fulfilling intellectual journey. Unfortunately, I am performing a glorified version of punching the time clock, and the financial rewards don't come anywhere near filling the emotional void of such diminished expectations."

-Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, Thomas B Kohnstamm

a Canadian in Japan...

...messes with a Japanese man...

...a small voice appeared beside me.
"Excuse me, " it said. "May I practise my English with you?"
..."I like very much the Macaroni Westerns. Do you like?" And then, in a sudden shift: "Tell me, when writing a letter, do you use P-S or B-S as the end? I understand that one is considered slang and the other is a way of -- "
"It's P-S. " [I answered]
"B-S, " he asked.
"P-S. P as in pneumonia and s as in psychotic."
-Hitching Rides with Buddha, Will Ferguson

hahahahaha

Ah-un

"You approach Shinto shrines...and the entrances are usually guarded by a pair of stone lion-dogs...komu-inu, "Korean dogs"...One lion-dog has a mouth that is always open, the other has a mouth that is always closed. The open mouthed lion-dog is named Ah, the other is named Un, or more properly, nn. "Ah" is the first sound you make when you are born, "nn" the last sound you make when you die. "Ah" is the breath inhaled that begins life, "nn" the exhale of release, the breath that allows life to escape. Between the two lies all of existence, a universe that turns on a single breath. Ah is also the first symbol in the Japanese alphabet, n the last. And so, between these two lion-dogs, you also have the A and the Z, the Alpha and Omega. In the original Sanskrit, ah-un means, "the end and the beginning of the universe; infinity unleashed."

In Japan, people who are in perfect tune with each other, such as a pianist and a violinist playing in duet, are called ah/un-no-kokyu. Kokyu means "breathing," and the phrase suggests perfect, exquisite harmony: ah/un-no-kokyu, two or more breathing as one. If self-actualization is the ideal to which the Western world aspires, then common breath is the ideal to which Japan-and indeed, much of Asia-aspires. The word harmony in Japanese has the same cachet that the word freedom has in the West...

On a less esoteric level, ah-un also refers to old married couples (or even old friends) who have been together for so long that they no longer have to finish their sentences. One begins with "Ah..." and the other agrees with "Nn..." (which is the Japanese equivalent of "uh-huh") and the entire meaning is understood."

-Hitching Rides with Buddha, Will Ferguson

memories

when asked if i think about the man i loved for a whole fifth of my life,
i can honestly answer that days sometimes go by without a thought.
when asked if i think about the man who raised me for the first fifth of my life,
i can honestly answer, again, that days pass, and when a thought appears, there is no accompanying emotion.
am i without a heart?
i like to think i'm simply more without strings
there are some, keeping me grounded to this moment, perhaps
but when each day allows for re-creation of this person i call myself
i need not be defined by the people, places, and things i've moved on from
on this the eve of a very big move
i'm mired in memories
deciding which to take
which to leave behind
which to donate
and which to discard
its a tiresome process, that demands nostalgia, measurement of pricelessness, and selectivity of necessity.
in the end, like my friend said, 'its just stuff.'
i still possess only two items from my childhood,
and will keep only one.
each year of your life becomes a smaller percentage of your life as time passes
and you own proportionally less from each era.
so many things being gifts, representing hard earned money of loved ones...i'm left with much to store.
and with them, i'm storing away that person who owned all those things
and realizing how much it feels like i could not even call that person me
the things changed, the things lost, the things forgotten...
and so this passage spoke to me:

"...how a file opens the door to a vast sunken labyrinth of the forgotten past, but how, too, the very act of opening the door itself changes the buried artifacts, like an archaeologist letting in fresh air to a sealed Egyptian tomb.
For these are not simply past experiences rediscovered in their original state. Even without the fresh light...our memories decay or sharpen, mellow or sour, with the passage of time and the change of circumstances...But with the fresh light the memory changes irrevocably. A door opens, but another closes. There is no way back now to your own earlier memory of that person, that event. It is like a revelation made, years later, to a loved one. Or like a bad divorce, where today's bitterness transforms all the shared past, completely, miserably, seemingly forever. Except that this bitter memory, too, will fade and change with the further passage of time.
So what we have is nothing less than an infinity of memories of any moment, event, or person: memories that change slowly always, with every passing second, but now and then dramatically, after some jolt or revelation. Like one of those digital photographs whose every color, tint, or detail can be changed on a computer screen, except that here we're not in control and can't revert at will to an earlier image. They say "The past is a foreign country," but actually the past is another universe.
-The File, Timothy Garton Ash

th!nk

"The writer William Faulkner once said, 'If I had to choose between pain and nothing, I would choose pain.' To the best of my knowledge, Faulkner was not a masochist. He didn't literally mean physical pain or deprivation, although he did suffer his share of these. He meant struggle over mind-numbing complacency and pleasure seeking. Faulkner knew that it was only in struggle, through confrontation of one's fears and life's difficulties, that a person became fully human, alive, and growing...
Research has shown that material comfort alone does not ensure happiness. Is-ness is not freedom or release or fulfillment, it just is. To be truly happy a person needs to be engaged, using his or her mind. To be really happy a person needs to feel he or she has accomplished something. Just one act of taking control can expand your moral and intellectual horizons and make you a better critical and creative thinker. It doesn't need to be 'intellectual.' It could be something as simple as riding a bike to the store instead of driving. It could be stopping for a beer at a biker bar. By doing something completely out of sync with what we identify as our 'character,' we stimulate thought and ideas, rediscover plans and goals...
When the primary pursuit in society becomes avoiding risk, seeking one's own, and keeping one's head down, life inevitably resolves itself into a comforting numbness. Out thoughts suffocate, the blood supply to our brains shrinks, as we grow fewer not more synapses. Once again, we aren't compelled to do anything. We can just sit here and collectively allow our brains to shrivel and let the next generation deal with the consequences. However, I invite the reader to consider the benefits of putting on a beanie, grabbing a kazoo, and setting off on a scootering excursion through the streets of his or her peaceful, comfortable neighborhood.
Metaphorically speaking, of course."

-Th!nk, Michael R LeGault

who's driving this train?

The other day, at work in the Admissions office of a large public university, a clerical staff worker remarked, "I've never seen so many low SATs come in before this year...these poor kids, what's going on...have they made the test harder?" At the time I joked that it was just our school, which could be simultaneously true, but the fact simply stands that America is getting dumber.

In discussion with a friend about the untextbooked, untaught truths in American history, covered by this book, I realized that the more time that goes by, the more history accumulates, and so many things will have to be glossed over, an unfortunate and inevitable truth of time perhaps, but still scary.

Yet things keep chugging along the status quo railroad with not enough of us realizing how outdated this form of transportation really is, and how we're on our way to derailing ourselves and our progress as individuals and as an advanced, prosperous country.

"But the one idea with the potential to really shake things up and deliver the best results over the long term is not so much practical as it is philosophical: re-establishing excellence as the primary goal of our educational institutions. This is not just a mission statement or a simplistic, meaningless platitude. It basically requires a generational shift in attitudes and policies in education and child development that have come to predominate in American society. These are permissiveness, a persistent diluting of standards and content, and the embrace of egalitarian education, rather than excellence, as the foundation and informing philosophy of schooling. Making the pursuit of excellence the norm will require grass-roots buy-in from teachers, government, and parents.
If the country is to reach this consensus about the philosophical aims of education, we first need to debunk the myth that striving for excellence means leaving kids behind or limiting access..."
-Th!nk, Michael R LeGault

more about testing:

"What kind of objective evidence should one look for to establish the superiority of any curriculum? One thinks almost immediately of tests. But one must be wary of the significance of mathematics tests. Presumably the mathematics courses have taught students to think through problems, to discover results for themselves, and to acquire insight into the concepts and proofs they have learned. Actually tests do not and to a large extent cannot measure such values. The usual tests require that a student answer a fair number of questions in a limited amount of time. If a question really called for thinking through a new type of problem or discovering a new result it would require so much time that average students would not be able to do well in the time allowed. Even if the student made intelligent and significant attempts to answer such questions his failure to reach a positive result would probably mean that he would receive little or no credit.

Hence, mathematics tests usually and almost perforce call for handing back information that has been learned and is merely being reproduced. The ability to memorize is the major faculty that is actually tested. While the acquisition of information is one objective of mathematics education, it is not supposed to be the sole or most important goal. Though most teachers would deny that they are testing memorization, their behavior belies their words. In Chapter 2 we noted that teachers do not permit their students to use their books during tests. But if the tests call for thinking on the part of the student, what vitiation of the tests would result from the use of books?" -this website

overload

"Another insidious effect of information overload, closely related to quality dilution, is informational confusion. As outlined in David Shenk's book, Data Smog, people now have at their fingertips an oversupply of statistics, expert opinions, and widely circulated but simplified stories with which to interpret the world. Nothing is muffled and context is vaporized. As Shenk relates:

The proliferation of expert opinion has ushered in a virtual anarchy of expertise. To follow the news today is to have the surreal understanding that the earth is melting and the earth is cooling; that nuclear power is safe and nuclear power is not safe; that affirmative action works--or wait, no it doesn't.

Or a big later in Data Smog:

Since nearly any argument imaginable can now be supported with an impressive data set, the big winner is...argumentation itself...Factionalism gets a big boost from volleys of data, while dialogue and consensus--the marrow of democracy--run thinner and thinner.

Perhaps this is the best point to lob in Einstein's aphorism, 'Information is not knowledge." The point to extrapolate from Shenk's analysis is that the information explosion is not leading to better critical and creative thinking; it is largely being used to spout off, preach, or confirm existing biases and flawed thinking."

-Michael R LeGault, Th!nk

excuses, excuses...

That being said, I still know this:

"according to research done by the tests' manufacturers, class rank and/or high school grades are still both better predictors of college performance than the SAT I."

better yet?

"The U.S is the only economically advanced nation to rely heavily on multiple-choice tests. Other nations use performance based assessment where students are evaluated on the basis of real work such as essays, projects, and activities. Ironically, because these nations do not focus on teaching to multiple-choice tests, they even score higher than U.S. students on those kinds of tests."-from FairTest.org

My whole point is just that we seem to be more and more a society that makes excuses for our shortcomings instead of taking actions to improve ourselves, and taking responsibility to learn from our weaknesses. This is well stated by Michael R LeGault in Th!nk,

"Yet, on a much broader scale, the huge, unprecedented boom in various learning disabilities is in keeping with America's transformation from a self-reliant culture to a culture of dependency...a shift in philosophical values, away from the common acceptance of that view that one's shortcomings are a result of flawed character or lack of initiative and toward the idea of a self in which one's flaws are a product of hardwired maladies and disorders. Thus, peoples excesses--food, gambling, shopping--are not problem behavior caused by lack of self-control, but addictions. One common explanation for poor scores on exams is a type of panic syndrome..."

And its sad enough that this exists in soon to be epidemic proportions, but the implications of this attitude and its exponential growth are what is scary:

"The explosion of the therapy culture, the learning disability industry, and the self-esteem movement can only harm the prospects for improving critical and creative thinking in America. With an educational system chiefly focused on the political aims to maintain the status quo, suppress guilt, modify behavior, and attend to the needs of slow learners, how realistic is it to expect excellent, inspired teaching? If everyone is automatically special, what incentive is there to devote extra time studying to obtain a B instead of a C, or an A rather than a B? Low expectations and mediocrity breed more of the same. If I'm labeled as having a learning disorder, it says right there in black and white, certified, I'M IMPAIRED! THINKING IS A BIG PROBLEM FOR ME.
So perhaps the quickest way out of this mess is to recognize and admit we are all suffering from one learning disorder or another, low self-esteem, or a composite of afflictions. This statement is not intended to be dismissive of the serious effect disorders such as autism, dyslexia, or even ADD-like symptoms can have on learning. Nonetheless, it is true that some of us are better at history than math, or memorizing rather than spatial visualization, or cooking rather than home repair...
The human mind's ability to critically reason is the essence of our self-reliance and, ultimately, freedom. Self-reliance and freedom are universally associated with the American way of life. If we continue to feed the feel-good monster it will very happily and contentedly devour that way of life."

you can count on more to come...

slow down and wake up

"But how real is stress? There are obviously traumatic events that can introduce severe stress into people's lives. But the meaning of stress, a word once applied to extreme, relatively rare situations, has been inflated to apply to just about everything that happens. Indeed, stress, say some experts, is largely a matter of perception and attitude. The word 'stress,' it turns out, generally has no more medical meaning than the phrase 'life is not perfect.' It is a word meant to convey a highly subjective psychological condition, which in turn is meant to life the burden of responsibility for the quality of our thinking and decisions from our shoulders...
...the stress epidemic is having a profound effect on the ability of people to think and reason. 'Critical thinking has dropped totally off the map for many people,' Sheperd says. Stress seems to work in a twofold way to short-circuit thinking. First, the overuse of the catchall term 'stress' prevents many people from employing precise language to assess their situations...and adopting a constructive plan to deal with it...The word and concept of stress inclines people to wash over and rant, rather than analyze and pinpoint the problem. Second, the widespread acceptance of the notion that there is a massive amount of stress in society creates a feeling of melancholic or angry resignation toward life. The goal becomes to 'manage stress,' which reinforces the belief that the power in life lies in events, not people, Sheperd claims.

We have a society where many, if not most people do not accept responsibility for their own lives. I am not just speaking of those who want to blame their parents or society because they have turned to a life of crime. I am referring to those who blame everyone and everything for the way they feel and behave in life.

...'The problem is, now stress is everything. In reality there really isn't stress, there are only good situations and bad situations. People that think in certain ways get through the bad situations better.' In an article published in the Economist, Howard Goldman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine expresses even less sympathy, suggesting much of stress is perception: 'Every generation thinks it's more stressed out and souped up than the rest.'
...The challenge is to liberate ourselves from this mass hypnosis and reclaim our curiosity, our thirst for knowledge, as opposed to pure emotion, and the full powers of our critical thinking - the best stress buster there is."
-Michael R LeGault, Th!nk

...And in the end, most of us are creating our own hells...the choice is yours to put yourself in certain situations, and not only that, the choice is yours in how you approach and handle them. Step back and out of yourself and you will likely see that you are creating your own busy world to give yourself more self-importance and/or because you are running from something, keeping yourself busy to avoid thinking about who and where you are, and all the many things you have to slow your life down to appreciate.

When the world was young

Did you stand and listen

When the world was young

In your heart

When the world was young

Did you stand there with it

When the world was young

in your heart

Where we running

where we running

where we running to?

Why we running

why we running

why we running through?
-'When the World was Young'