Department Of Good Advice For A Good Week
Dateline: Monday, 6:15 am-ish, listening to The Daily Calm [1], a ten minute guided meditation from my Calm meditation app. The morning’s topic was envy.
“Envy emerges when we devote attention to the many things we don’t have. By diverting attention to the many things we *do* have, we invite happiness…
This sounds easy, but we rarely admit to ourselves that we are envious…. It’s helpful to consciously challenge our distorted perceptions, remembering that things are never what they seem.Those who seem to have it all almost certainly have suffering we don’t see….
Envy is often the result of an incomplete perspective. As Josh Billings said, ‘Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.’
So, next time you find yourself fixated on the narrowness of (what you think you ) lack, widen your view.”
This is a wide enough view for me, for now.
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Department Of A Question For The New Year…
The question I have for the new year [2] is a question that, in one of my many pipe dreams, would find answers in the new year. The question concerns educational reform (elementary through university), but it could be applied to almost anything.
An introductory given: it is impossible, of course, to pretend you don’t know something or haven’t experienced something when you do/you have. Still, what if you tried your best to redesign something as if it hadn’t existed before? As in, you would be designing it for the circumstances, knowledge, and culture of the present, and not the past.
A 100+ year old idea of what a school of the future might look like. [3]
“Sarah Stein Greenberg runs Stanford’s d.school, which teaches design as a mode of problem solving. She and (PIMA podcast host Steve Levitt) talk about what makes her field different from other academic disciplines, how to approach hard problems, and why brainstorms are so annoying.”
(introduction to, and the fololowing excerpts from, How to Have Good Ideas,
People I Mostly Admire podcast, 1-3-25; my emphases )
Steve Levitt ( PIMA podcast host ):
“It’s especially interesting for me to be talking to you right now because I’m in the middle of a big design project, trying to create and launch a radical new high school in partnership with Arizona State University….”
Stein Greenberg:
“Tell me what you mean when you say radical.
What is going to be radically different?”
Levitt:
“When I say radical, I mean we really are turning upside down almost every accepted piece of how we do high school right now. There’ll be relatively limited synchronous learning, essentially no cases where there’s a teacher up in front of 30 students lecturing. The students will have a lot more autonomy in deciding what they study and when they study. We’re moving towards a mastery model and away from a traditional grading model. Most of what we do in high school today is — we do it because we did the same thing 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. And so, what would high school look like if you started over? That’s really the premise we’re coming from.”
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Department Of Ageist And Cultural Expectations
We are in the midst of having bathroom remodel work done, and also replacing our old water heater. The plumbers worked in sets of two…we’ve had to have a couple of callbacks. They are young; this is good; trade skills need to be learned and passed on to a new generation. Still, I told MH last week that moiself “…would feel better, as in more confident of their skills, if instead of two guys who look like they’re still learning to shave they were one big older dude with a potbelly and sagging pants. I mean, how can they be plumbers? – I haven’t see their…you know…professional credentials.”
* * *
Department Of Is There Really Such A Thing
As Too Much Information?
Another story related to the bathroom remo. As we (MH and I) are getting closer to having the old mold-infested shower replaced, there are decisions to be made.
A Haiku For A Catchy Mantra
Watchwords; catchphrases;
Slogans; mottos – it’s fun, to
concoct a new one.
That new mantra/words to live by we concocted is our determining factor for the height of the pony wall for our new MB shower. For those ignorant in such matters, [4] a pony wall is a partial wall separating or dividing two spaces. In the context of our shower, the pony wall will support one side of a partial glass wall. Heights for a shower pony wall can vary; they are typically from three to four feet tall, ala the one pictured below.
Measurements are set for our new shower’s wall panels and glass door and floor. Before proceeding, our project manager told us, we needed to choose the pony wall height.
MH and moiself discussed the fact that the shower’s pony wall, topped with glass to make one complete side of the shower, is directly across from our large bathroom window, which faces our neighbor’s bathroom window. We’re getting new window shades but they will take a few weeks to arrive; until then, the bathroom windows are bare. Thus, part of our pony wall height calculations included what we figured we can live with, re our neighbors possible “seeing” us when we’re in the shower, sans window shades. [5]
We’re both not too concerned as per our chestal areas (as the SNL Church Lady might put it) possibly being on view; but we would prefer privacy below the waist. Thus, we – I keep using the royal we but really and truly, this is one time that moiself was not solely to blame credit – decided our pony wall height requirement could be summed up thusly:
Boobs, not pubes.
Catchy, y’all gotta admit.
Also it sounds (to me at least) like it could be a classic three word slogan, something chanted during a political protest march, or boldly proclaimed on a sign ( “Boobs, not pubes!” ). About what issue, or cause….? To be decided.
Hell yeah, we ( read: moiself ) shared this with our project manager.
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [6]
“If, as the true believers claim, the word ‘gospel’ means good news, then the good news for me is that there is no gospel, other than what I can define for myself, by observation and conscience. As a freethinking human being, I have come not to favor or fear religion, but to face and fight it as an impediment to civilized advancement.”
( Steve Benson, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, ex-Mormon, grandson of
Mormon president Ezra Taft Benson, as quoted in “From Latter-Day Saint
to Latter Day Ain’t” (Freethought Today, December 1999) [7]
* * *
May we remember to widen our view;
May you remember to check a tradesperson’s…credentials;
May you come up with an inspiring three word slogan;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] “These short sessions focus on different aspects of mindfulness and introduce new concepts for both beginner and advanced meditation students.”
[2] I have many, many questions for and about the new year. One at a time….
[3] “The Public Domain Review presents ‘a series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the year 2000.” Teaching&learninginhighered.org
[4] Like moiself , before we undertook a bathroom redo.
[5] Or with window shades which we’ve forgotten to pull down. Stuff happens.
[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[7] “I was on track to eternal Mormon stardom, reserved especially for faithful men in a church run by men,” Benson has written. He and his wife Mary Ann, who have four children, left the Mormon Church in a highly publicized break in 1993, “citing disagreement over its doctrines on race, women, intellectual freedom and fanciful storytelling,” as he has written. Benson lists among the benefits of leaving religion: “Another day off, a 10-percent raise and getting to choose his own underwear.” ( excerpts from Freethought Today profile, 1-2-25, compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor, © Freedom From Religion Foundation )
