She's Got the Look

Finally, on this last day of vacation, I'm looking rested. I told my spouse that I could easily support a schedule of 3 weeks on and 1 week off because we'd probably accomplish the same amount that way and be much more refreshed and less stressed.

The sun is out today, and the breeze is minimal, so I'll probably go for a walk later. I've enjoyed being an indoor vegetable while the clouds and wind have dominated the weather, but now I'm feeling the desire to get out, inhale fresh clean air, and get my blood moving. I've missed the weekly yoga sessions, but not enough to motivate me to practice on my own. It's time to get going again.

One of my Christmas gifts was a very small HD video camera, and I need to learn how to use it. Part of my process is reading the manual several times to figure out where the buttons are and what they do, and then trying to use it in unimportant situations. That way, when I really want to capture a person or an event, I won't be stumbling around and cursing myself for not knowing how to do it. I know I'll have plenty of opportunities to video some one-time events, like people visiting, trips that I take, athletic events, and performances in upcoming months, and I want to be ready for them. It takes SD cards, so I've purchased a few high capacity ones (8 and 4 Gb) to be used in it since video eats up a ton of space. This camera is so small ... the proverbial size-of-a-deck-of-cards ... that it should be easy to carry and use. I hope it's not also easy to lose! With luck that wrist strap will help prevent me from setting it down somewhere and leaving it behind.

It's not even noon and I feel the encroachment of the Pre-Monday Blues. In fact, I felt its cold fingers stroking my spirit yesterday. As much as I enjoy some kinds of feelings of regularity and productivity in my life, I'd prefer that they be on my terms, and those terms would include the absence of a certain collection of lazy, foul-mouthed, uncooperative, teen-aged male slugs. The saving grace is that I'm not alone in my judgement of this current crop of underclassmen as being much lazier and much less patient than students of the recent past. I think they've grown up in a world of easy and immediate answers and solutions provided by machines so they haven't had many chances to - or been asked to - slow down and think deeply, or to figure things out for themselves. This is the problem that people forecast when affordable hand-held calculators burst onto the scene. "Kids will never learn to do math in their heads. What will happen to the world then?!" I think we're getting the answer to that statement of panic now. Even with search engines, the majority of teenagers with whom I've been in contact lately don't have a clear idea of how to search for information unless it's on a social networking site. Most can't subtract (accurately) in their heads or even on paper. They believe that going to a library to conduct research means using the computers in the library to search online. They expect that the machine will understand what they're trying to say and correct all of their errors. And they feel that they can talk to other human beings the way they can talk to their computers. To me, that's the most chilling part: kids' interactions with other flesh-and-blood people in their presence are becoming less civil at an alarming rate. The distance that communications with "people" behind the glass of a computer interface provides lets them think that they can behave in ways that horrify those of us who grew up in the dark ages before this plethora of technology. I'll continue to work against this phenomenon by modeling, teaching and expecting civility, and I'll hope that thoughtful and courteous behavior doesn't go completely out of style until after I'm pushing up daisies.