I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
2002-02-20 - 12:15 a.m.
My father went to the hospital today. We are all glad about it, it is what he needs. I don't know if he's been admitted yet, I hope so. My mother took him to the doctor this morning and the doctor called the ambulance and had him taken to the hospital. They wouldn't admit him directly though as there is nothing specific wrong with him. He had to go to the emergency room. He was taken there around 11:30 and was still in the ER last time we checked. This will be a tough day for him but once he's in a room he'll be much better off. They have to find what was wrong with him. I came up with a theory today that I'll have to discuss with his doctor. When he was in the hospital he got progressively better. Once he came home he started deteriorating. I was wondering if perhaps he is having a reaction to something at home. It might be an allergic reaction or perhaps a pathogen that doesn't bother people with stronger systems than his. This might be ridiculous but the history of his illness makes a case for it.
With all this I'm feeling better than I have the last few days. I heard Life is Large by the The Kennedys on the radio on the train in and really paid attention to it. That really made me feel better.
Class is getting a bit strange. I announced the first test and some students totally lost their focus. They did the thing that I hate the most in class. They weren't interested in learning, just in hearing about the test. One student kept asking what would be on the test even when I said to stop asking that. I told them that everything is on the test. As one of my friends put it, "No I'm teaching you things that I don't want you to learn so don't' study them." One student got upset because I didn't hand out a study guide for the test. Are students so coddled now? I never had any teacher give me a study guide for a test in my life. Is it so hard to just study the chapters in the book that we covered? We have only done one and a half chapters of new material plus half a chapter of review. Does he need for me to give him the table of contents of the book so he knows what to study?
Worse than all that though was when I found out that not one student had ever heard of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or Douglas Adams. I bet at Tufts where my nephew goes every student has heard of it. Carey and Leah agree that I should simply fail the entire class. I just checked with Gella and she votes for mass failure too. We did a problem where the answer was 42 and no one understood that that was an auspicious event. Very disheartening.
I saw an interesting Nova tonight. It was about the escape attempts at a German POW camp during WWII. The prisoners even built a glider to escape from the roof using the primitive tools they had available. None of them were trained aeronautical engineers either, they just learned how from books. The war ended before they could use it but they made an exact replica recently and tried it out. It really flew. It is amazing what people are capable of when driven by necessity. Sometimes I think the human race is pretty remarkable.
My computer pulled a mean trick on me tonight. Somehow I lost my CD database. Somehow a copy of it with a bit less than a third of my collection was still lurking on my hard drive. I'm going to have to reenter the rest of the CDs. At least it will give me something to do for the next month. I'll have to remember to get back the CDs I lent Carey. While filing away CDs I found an autographed Loudon Wainwright one that I got for Carey and forgot about. I'll have to bring it with me next trip. I'm a real donut sometimes.
Tomorrow I'm going to run from School to the Hospital than off to play bridge. Maybe I'll see if I can get moving earlier in the day and see him before class. I'll play it by ear.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile 2002-02-20
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