Results of Ruminations

In 1997, my brother rented the PlayStation game with the largest hype that I had, in my 13 years on the planet, ever heard of. As this was pre-internet (which was there, but so nascent at the time that hardly anyone used it), I didn't have any connection to why people were excited or what made them salivate so much when someone mentioned Final Fantasy VII. My older brother, suckered in by the hype, threw down $4 (I would guess) and picked up a copy from the nearby Hollywood Video (probably; Blockbuster was the other option). I remember him running through the intro, changing the main character's name from "Cloud" to "CloudY" because he was simply fiddling his way through, fought a couple of enemies, and said, "Looks pretty cool." You don't have to watch the entire video, but it goes through those opening scenes which, with the exception of Resident Evil 2  (which came out one year later), is the game that I've played the most--though...

This is the first of a series of essays in which I look at music videos as an avenue to expanding the meaning of a song. Thanks to friends who have sent me dozens of recommendations, I have a larger quantity of possibilities than I have time to rewatch and analyze them. Nevertheless, I hope that I can dig something out that people enjoy, even if their suggestion didn't make the cut. I'm starting with an easy one to try to get myself situated. I selected Death Cab For Cutie's "I Will Possess Your Heart". Below are the video and the lyrics. This particular video is over 8 minutes long, but I think you need to watch it in its entirety before going on. The Set Up I've embedded the YouTube version of the song for you to watch. Again, it's a little bit on the long side, but it needs to be watched, not simply listened to. And, for convenience's sake, the lyrics ( found here ): How I wish you could see the potential, the potential of you and me It...

I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of Alfie Kohn. If you're not an educator, then you likely haven't heard of him. If you are  an educator, then you likely have heard of him and have an opinion one way or the other. The thing about his work that bothers me is he feels more like a contrarian polemicist than a committed educator, as if stirring the pot on education is his purpose, rather than improving the way our students learn and our teachers instruct. Still, he has some valid points, even if his conclusion wanders away from what I'm interested in. I don't care so much about the "ranking" of students, as he posits in this article , as I am in the concept of grades. His first four or five paragraphs are more interesting and worthwhile (it would impact all students, rather than the higher echelon of aggressively academic kids) but he quickly pivots into a lengthy rumination on valedictorians and other types of ranks. Since Kohn doesn't want to approac...

There's a leak in my house. Not a large one, but a persistent one. The previous owners fixed some piping before they sold us the place, but neglected to properly seal the hole through which the pipe comes, leading to a constant drip. My wife thinks it's actually the water main. I don't know what to think, as everyone who has offered advice has either had contradictory advice (including the plumbers we brought in and didn't help at all) or nothing at all. I'm shutting down about the whole thing, which is bad, since we're headed to Europe for a couple weeks and can't really have a bucketful of water filling in our basement twice a day. Part of what frustrates me about it is how small, yet catastrophic it is. Bit by bit, drip by drip, the bucket fills. It's a painful metaphor for the end of this year. Since election night, I've been on a steady IV of depression. Every snippet of news, every reminder of the history that is repeating itself before my ...

A video hit my timeline a little while ago. It comes from earlier in the year. The main idea is summed up in this little Vine: In typical lack-of-nuance reporting, a lot of people took this to mean that all  dinosaurs were incapable of vocalization, and instead relied on syrinx to create sounds more like modern day birds do. Instead, if you read the conclusion of the report (or watch this video about it), you'll see that we're not talking about dinosaurs qua dinosaurs, but instead the branch of dinosaurs that filled a different evolutionary niche that survived the K-T extinction (and all the history of dinosaurs that came before it). Science on a straight line. Clear as can be. Found here . I like to think of it as working on an address, but backwards. The address of my house would be the far right of that diagram above ("Living birds")--very specific, easily observable. Then we have the road on which my house resides, which is connected to a larger thoroug...

In the post-NaNoWriMo brain-sploodge (I'm pretty sure that's a real phrase), I've been negligent with my non-fiction essay writing. And my normal writing. And, you know....doing things with words. I haven't written any worthwhile poetry in...well, years, probably. I wrote one poem with my creative writing class, and it wasn't anything worth putting time into. I've hobbled together three far too long and complicated essays, with a fourth in the works, but I haven't dropped a word in any of the different books or worlds that I want to work on. On one level, it's a nice purge. I wrote a lot, really fast, with very little planning, and pulled off a novella . The goal forcing me to put in the word count was really draining, and since I not only wanted to "win" NaNoWriMo again, I wanted to finish a story in time to gift it to my wife for Christmas. Having done that, I wasn't ready for more writing. As a result, the daily thoughts here on thi...

Back before America one-upped the Brexit vote for most insane political move, I wrote an essay  on how things aren't as horrible as we thought they were. Though I was fairly confident at the time that our society wouldn't jump off the cliff, I was proven wrong--which will happen again, I'm sure, and again and again. One of the things that my essay didn't address, but has been on my mind, is the idea of why we feel as though everything is unraveling. A long time ago (read: Whenever you were a kid and life was easy...because you were a kid), we didn't have problems with [fill in the blank]: LGBTQA+ rights, or people of color leveling accusations of police brutality, or women demanding that they get equal payment for the work they do. Right? Right? History and the Gay Community Kind of, but not really. There were problems with LGBTQA+ rights in the past, but they weren't covered in the public sphere. Harvey Milk, for example, was fined for being gay and not we...

HEADS UP: I'm talking about nudity, questions of social mores surrounding the exposure of the human form, and including illustrative pictures that could be construed as being inappropriate, particularly if you're of the younger variety. If any of what I mentioned here might bother you, I recommend you skip this one. Going Gaga In 2013, I went to Paris for the first time. While there, I went to the Louvre and looked at some of the most incredible artwork the Western world has created. I saw The Mona Lisa , enormous paintings by Jacques Louis David, and many other impressive, indescribable pieces--artwork that I'd only ever read about before. As I was bopping through the museum (as one does), there was an advertisement for a new, small exhibit by Lady Gaga. The ad had a person, lying in a bathtub, in the pious pose of The Death of Marat by David. I remember wondering what I was actually looking at, since, from a distance, it simply looked like someone had put together De...

I mentioned that  I'm a fan of Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern series, which I've been revisiting with my sons as we travel to and from school. They listen to the audiobook and read along as we go, which has helped both of them improve their reading abilities (one is in first grade, the other in fourth). This is satisfying on a couple of levels, not the least of which because it means that they're enjoying the incredible world of Pern. With awesome '70s hair like that, Jaxom is sure to get all  the ladyfolk of Pern! I'm anxious to get out of the Todd McCaffery stuff (written with his mom, Anne), which, while enjoyable because it's on Pern, is nothing compared to what the original books could do. What the late Anne McCaffery managed to build in the world of Pern was, to my mind, impossible to recreate. Though she admits that she was a soft-science fiction writer (one where the science behind the fiction isn't feasible or realistic; as oppose...

For this year's work on Les Miserables,  I gave the students a "yellow passport", a shout out to the paper that Jean Valjean brings with him to the Bishop's house at the beginning of the novel. The passport marks him as a convict and is the thing that will continue to hold him back from a life--a good life, an honest life, a better life. Though Jean Valjean doesn't become honest in the way, perhaps, the Bishop hopes he will, Valjean becomes a better man--and it's all because he left the worst part of him behind: The piece described on the yellow passport. My students were challenged to take something that they wanted to improve, regardless of how profound or superficial it was, and change themselves. They were to take their own personal "yellow passport" and become a better person as a result. They then had to extend the assignment into a symbol that represented the new them: Jean Valjean takes two silver candlesticks with him wherever he goes, a c...

I don't believe in creationism. I certainly understand the arguments about it, but it puts observational fact at odds of hermeneutics, and that's something that has been demonstrated as problematic, historically, for as long as Christianity has been around. To lay aside what we can apprehend with our minds strikes me as folly, not faithful. I have two beefs with creationism that I want to outline here, realizing that many people who read this likely will be bothered that my thoughts don't parallel their own. Such is life. Anyway, here are the two points I want to stick explore: The question of literal interpretations; and the nature of the God who exists within creationism. Literally the Truth It's probably no surprise that, considering the abuse it's suffered during the 21st century, I am leery about people using the word literally . Far too frequently, it's misused as a superlative instead of an adjective, which grinds this grammarian's gears. Howeve...