Sentential Links

Time for LINKS!!!

:: There was me, Amanda, and there was Amanda’s TED speech, and she was spending a lot more time with her TED speech than she was with me.

:: It’s that great moment of seeing something you loved when you were younger and haven’t revisited for a very long time and finding it holds up even better than you thought. (I was a bit older when Pulp Fiction came out, but it’s still one of my favorite movies. I’ve never forgotten the first time I saw it…in a theater all by myself, because it was brand new and word-of-mouth hadn’t started building yet.)

:: How does the play weather a fourth reading? Excellently. It was wasted on my teenaged self, but it was a revelation when I taught it to my son in 2003 and again when I brought it to my daughters in 2009. (Ah, Julius Caesar — the play that started me on the road to thinking “Hey, maybe there’s something to this Shakespeare fellow after all!” We read it in tenth grade, and we focused on all the usual stuff: Brutus and Anthony, Caesar’s arrogance, the Ides of March, “The good is oft interred with our bones”, et cetera. But when I re-read it last year, what struck me between the eyes was a brief and horrifying scene when the Roman crowd, whipped into a frenzy, kills an innocent poet who just happens to have the same name as one of the conspirators. I don’t recall my tenth grade teacher making much of Shakespeare’s cynicism regarding the malleability of mob opinion, but that’s what I think about now whenever I think about that play.)

:: And all this puts me in mind of the young man I used to be and somehow lost track of.

I miss him. (I think that everybody has this moment at some point in their lives. The sooner we realize that the young guy is still in there, the better life gets.)

:: Not only did he publish without me, he got a patent on the idea as well. He did include me in the acknowledgements, but in science that’s worth exactly nothing. (I’m often glad I didn’t end up in academia.)

:: You know what I think? I think wasted potential is a lot scarier than feeling overwhelmed. There is no monster greater than regret. I wouldn’t wish it on any one. (I could not agree more, and I have a post on this topic on the way!)

:: But what kind of a place is it, that people are armed to the teeth, and terrified at the prospect of home invasion? What does it mean to live in a country that was, for generations, defined by institutionalized racism? Is South Africa really just Texas with a Dutch accent? (I said that I‘m not snarking anymore. I didn’t say I wouldn’t occasionally link other people’s snark!)

More next week….

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