New Leaves

When you're trying to restructure your everything, you have to start thinking hard about why your habits were what they were. I recently read an article, from Cracked.com of all places, and it inspired me to turn over a new leaf. Funnily enough, the leaf remains the same leaf it was before, a fact that seems so straightforward that I wonder if the original phrase is conjuring the wrong image in my head.

Regardless.

I wrote down the five things that I want to be my priorities. I listed learning, creativity, purpose, youth, and friends/family. When I say "youth", by the by, I'm not talking about maintaining my own, but influencing kids. Finding programs to be a part of. Hell, STARTING some if I don't find any to my liking. "Purpose" is a kind of short-hand for me; I want my actions, preferably all of them, to be done with meaning and intent behind them. Granted that we all choose all of our actions, but it's so easy to do things by HABIT rather than with intent. Eating well, good hygiene, a clean house: these are all part of what I mean by "purpose".

So, I wrote those down, and the point behind doing so is to structure my days accordingly. Currently, by the pattern of my recent days, my priorities have been YouTube, Facebook, reading, eating, and video games. While getting some other things done, those have been the focus of my time. So, time and past to make my days reflect my priorities.

Easier said than done.

I don't intend to simply say things like "no more Youtube!" because frankly, I do have fun with it. Not when I surf from link to link and spend hours clicking "just one more video," but I do often enjoy what I watch. So this afternoon, I went online while I ate a belated lunch. This led to, at one point, a great deal of time spent on the archives of a favorite webcomic. I looked up, realized it was after four, and realized I wasn't sure when I'd last moved. Time to stop reading. I got up and did other things, but it's still easy to drift into something else. And then into something else. The article I read talked about how no improvements will be made, we will DO NOTHING unless we have motivation. A proverbial gun to our heads. That gun is self-provided, though. It's not immediately there in my forefront brain. I have to train it to be, I guess.

Tell you what I did do, though: I went up to my alma mater and wandered around for a few hours, helping the freshmen move in. I walked, I talked, I advised, I answered questions, I shlepped a great deal of luggage, and I made a few new connections. If I can be, at any point in their time here, a boon, then that is something I will happily be. It's a priority of mine.

Libere: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Chapter 1

Per one of my last conversations with friend TNT, I'm embarking on my first reading of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. I've seen my husband star in Venice Theater's recent performance of it; I've watched the Boris Karloff movie from the 30's, the Kenneth Branagh movie from the 90's, Young Frankenstein, and even the puerilely oriented Monster Squad. I'd bypassed entirely, however, the experience of READING the dang thing.

A fact of which I'm weirdly glad: I think I would've been discouraged by the density of the language, when I was younger. Now, I just have to focus a little to keep my brain from checking out and skimming unseeing over the words. The phrasing is beautiful, actually. It has the same poetry you often get from literature of that time --thankfully, it's reminding me more the writing of Jane Eyre (my favorite book) than of Tale of Two Cities (of which I've read a page and a half).

For the book itself, I've read Walters's opening letter to his sister. Of this, I'm not sure I have much to say. I was caught by the quote: "...nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose --a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye," which I think I want to print and laminate for my classroom wall. Also, I was struck by the expositional quality of the thing. This is a man's letter to his sister, who one would assume knows the man's history of obsession, poetry attempts, and failure. Is it only for my relative inexperience with old writing that makes this remarkable? In modern storytelling, we would rag on the author for stiltedly feeding us this background via an unrealistic situation: the man's sister knows him, so he wouldn't be repeating his story to this extent. We'd call it weak writing. Yet when I think on what Shakespeare plays I know, the dialog is similarly stuffed with backstory. So perhaps it's a modern snobbery of ours to require subtler exposition.

Alright. Those are my initial thoughts on the initial chapter. Looking forward to more.

Only in Dreams

Dream-me is far more Disney than I am, I feel.

A coworker in my hall, A., tracked me down this morning to say that I had featured in her dream, last night. She'd been teaching, everything was going fine, but she had a bird in her hair. "I need to get this bird out of my hair," she mused. "Who in our hall would know what to do? I know!" and fetched me to help. I, all calm and cool, extract the bird easily from her hair. I then proceed to gently scold the bird, saying, "Now, you know you're not supposed to nest in people's hair. It's not nice," and so on.

Let it be known, one and all: I am to be relied upon in a pinch.

Ubuntu Don't Need no Boundaries

Jeremy and I are having small adventures in building our new computer. First, we planned to replace all the guts, but keep the case. After some tomfoolery with getting the motherboard, Big Ben and I put together the computer on Sunday. Mostly. It would have helped if I'd remembered that I kept getting mildly zapped by this case when I'd reach behind it to mess with the back. Some kind of grounding problem. Wouldn't turn on with the new parts.

On Ben's advice, I put the whole thing together SANS case on Monday, to make sure that at least the parts themselves work. The power supply doesn't, but our old one will hold us over until we can get that sorted.

The case should come in today (huzzah, Amazon Prime's two-day shipping), so Jeremy and I went ahead and installed Ubuntu on our caseless, guts-spilled-across-our-breakfast-bar computer last night. Had to install from an old 10th edition CD, but we'll update it to 13.whatever once it's connected to the internet.

All our old libraries are on a borrowed, portable hard drive. We have made the pact that nothing is to be transferred back to our new computer without first evaluating it for relevancy (do we still need it, is it a duplicate file), then sorting it into its proper home. We have bad habits in our file management, but we can sort that.

So! Our computer is a computer. Soon, it will even look like one.

Crossword Puzzle Snobbery

So...

Looking up crossword puzzles for teens, I find many that are gorgeous, educational, and relevant. I see ones on statistics, WWI, mythology, geometry terms, civil rights, the works. Each one gives a brief example of the kind of clues you'll find.

Congress:
a provision not likely to pass on its own merit that is attached to an important measure certain to pass. is the House sitting not as itself but as one large committee of itself. divisions of existing committees formed to address specific issues. are little different from bills, and when passed have the force of law. a procedure to bring a bill to the floor of the legislative body when a committee has refused to report it.

Electromagnetism:
used to located objects on Earth. electromagnetic waves that you can detect with your eyes. has the highest frequency and therefore they carry the most energy. electromagnetic waves with wavelengths longer than about 0.001 . even higher frequncy than ultraviolet rays and has enough energy to go through the skin and the muscle.

And then I see ones on sports. Music.

Sports:
im good at wrestling and holding other players. im very strong . often played by kids with chalk. the ball is oblong shaped. often played by smart people.

Music:
i sing threw this. i add intense bass. i have wee bells and tap on the knee. when on stage in front of a crowd i like to. a hillbilly guitar.

Which is not to say that the subject material isn't RIFE with critical, intellectual possibilities. It's just also the material that is more likely to draw authors who haven't grasped the concept of capitalization and apostrophes.

Props to the Music guy for his use of "wee," though.

"Gradysauce"

I'm... I'm an adjective, now. Or maybe a noun. I don't know the origin of adding "sauce" to the end of adjectives like it's a suffix, which seems to turn them into nouns, but it's apparently a little more widespread than I thought. "_____-sauce." I'd only heard of "awesomesauce" and "weaksauce," but I immediately understood when Virtus described a particularly easy lesson as "simplesauce." I was in fact able to make immediate use of the word, discovering that it's now apparently a noun in the process: "Yes, this lesson was quite simplesauce. The last lesson, if you recall, was simplesauce as well. And really, I refuse to do two such simplesaucy lessons in a row, so we're mostly skipping this one."

Virtus was appreciative of my use of his word, so he and the Boys started playing around with "Gradysauce." They ultimately decided that it was best used as a stand-in for Latin; that the class was now "Gradysauce." As in, "guess what I learned in Gradysauce, today?"

So. My titles have now expanded to Ms. Grady, Mrs. Grady, Miss Grady, Miss, Grady, "Grades," occasionally "Anya" to bold students outside the classroom, and Mom. In seventh period, I teach Gradysauce.

My, how many hats I wear.

Analyzing a New Word: "Eludicate"

“It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.”

-Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I keep talking to my Reading kids about the USEFULNESS of understanding prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Of how you might not know a word (you might not know MANY words. English is like an obsessed fanboy with words: you gotta collect the whole set), but you can at least piece together and idea from the bits of the context.

Take the above quote. I found it by briefly browsing Dictionary.com’s “give me a random quote” section, and realized that I’m not entirely sure what Mr. Merleau-Ponty means. “The irrational” isn’t too difficult, as he’s either talking about irrational thoughts or irrational people. Maybe both, given the vagueness of his substantive adjective. “Elucidate,” however, is not a word I’ve come across often enough to know. So I had a moment of “wha-?” confusion and was about to hit the next button, when I decided to think about it for a moment.

Let’s break it down.

Elucidate: The first thing I notice is luc, usually a root word for “light”. Next is the e-, likely from the Latin ex, meaning “from” or “out”. That –ate ending means it’s a verb.

Five, ten seconds of actually blinking at the word and not just blitzing past it means that I think he’s talking about bringing the irrational out into the light. I’ll look it up, later, to see if I’m right.

[Edit, end of the day]

YUP.  Or close enough. Elucidate, v. To make something clear, explain. Mr. Merleau-Ponty wants to make the irrational clear, or to explain the irrational. Irrational more likely stands for “irrational things/thoughts,” in that light.