I was going to go for a run but I got a burrito instead.
I’m not proud but I’m not sorry either. We had a day-long work meeting (that’s part of why I didn’t get around to writing one of these yesterday, that and I had an early start today for a different work event) and when we got done I had been thinking of heading over by the river but it was late enough in the day that I figured I’d bring home dinner. Also I wanted a burrito, that’s the main reason. Maybe I’ll write a self-help book about the benefits of finding what sound like pro-social reasons for doing what you want. Weapons For Good: Put Your Communal Narcissism In Service To Justice!The meeting was good, it’s a department retreat I asked that we hold a while back - basically we talk about our own scholarship and the stuff we like and how to do more of it better - and people dug it and asked that we start doing it every semester. That’s fun, though it’s also tiring. The event today was a workshop I attended by zoom, continues tomorrow, really exciting, I learned a lot, and none of this is interesting recollection fodder: I was in a room listening and talking, I was on my computer listening and talking.
Today on the zoom call my youngest daughter brought me a travel mug of tea, that was nice, and she let the most social of the cats into the room as well, who then proceeded to put her nose in my face and pat me with a paw, this went on for many minutes before she curled up by knee purring. That was nice, it’s nice to be liked. I like to imagine her telling the other cats how stupid the people are - ‘I was VERY clear, I put my nose right on his nose, but he didn’t give me even ONE treat, I swear they’re only half trainable.’ Area Man Imagines His Cats Can Talk.
I’m pre-occupied with work stuff at the moment due to the week I’m having and the week I anticipate next week and don’t want to write about it - it’s nothing secret or whatever, that’s just not the point of this thing - and I’m drawing a bit of a blank about anything else to say. I’ve been talking and writing in various ways about how human lives are hard to sum up or boil down but I’m having a week that doesn’t seem especially hard to summarize - I worked a lot, I thought about work a lot when I wasn’t at work. Heh. I’d call it bleak except this week is full of stuff I like about my job. Young me would call that even bleaker, but then young me thought Minor Threat were deep, so... Yeah that’s right, fuck you kid! Maybe that’s the real appeal of looking back in embarrassment, permission to sneer at young people? Just wait whippersnapper, some day you too will have preferences for the bland and tepid! Having written that I remembered that when I read to one of my kids last night the kids in the story had rice pudding, which I’d hardly call bland. I suppose one could dismissively call it inoffensive - if one were an asshole! who dismisses pudding? - but it just tastes good. Now I want some.
I talked to two friends on the phone briefly yesterday while commuting. One is working on a project I have a thing in and had sent me an email saying ‘hey call me about our project’ which immediately sent me wondering what I’d fucked up in the project and would need to apologize for. It reminded me of when my wife found an article in the newspaper about identifying emotions from faces, I forget the full context, something about emotional intelligence maybe? It was nine pictures of the same person with different expressions. The top three rows were the person doing different smiles, the middle were different versions of a neutral expression, and the bottom row were variations on unhappy expressions, and the instruction was to identify the angry face. Of course it was a trick question, since it was nine angry faces. Our kids did better on it than my wife or I did, and ultimately that’s true success, isn’t it, contribution to generational progress?
These are both friends I made in my 30s or 40s, so I’m basically a superhero, sorry to brag. Call me Spider Plant Man. Though I suppose I do subject my friends to phone calls, which no one wants anymore, so maybe it's super villain? The evil Doctor Phone Tag. This reminds me, the other day I forgot my laptop and the class I teach in doesn't have a clock so I had my phone out to keep track of time and one of my students did a class jaw drop gawp at my having a flip phone. I'm basically in a dwindling species of megafauna.
