No Apologies

I’ve decided I will no longer apologize–neither to myself nor to my anonymous audience here–for failing to write on this blog. Part of getting older entails sacrifices and necessary shifts from idealisms of youth and hobbies once held sacred. Writing for most of my burgeoning life has been a method for me to cogitate and develop independence of thought, but most importantly, to relieve myself of loneliness and give voice to an inner life long held silent.

But now I am married and professionally immersed. Though I don’t have many close friends in NYC since I moved here five years ago, I don’t generally have time to feel lonely. I continue to develop and refine my philosophies, but that development now either takes place amongst discussion with colleagues at my school, at education conferences or events, or on my professional blog, Schools as Ecosystems.

So while I do miss the personal and introverted creative explorations/exorcisms I once performed regularly here on this blog, I won’t allow myself to be burdened by guilt that I am compromising some essential aspect of my existence. The reality is that I am developing in other ways, and such is as it should be, because it must be, and it will be.

Omens

That’s why Bostrom hopes the Curiosity rover fails. ‘Any discovery of life that didn’t originate on Earth makes it less likely the great filter is in our past, and more likely it’s in our future,’ he told me. If life is a cosmic fluke, then we’ve already beaten the odds, and our future is undetermined — the galaxy is there for the taking. If we discover that life arises everywhere, we lose a prime suspect in our hunt for the great filter. The more advanced life we find, the worse the implications. If Curiosity spots a vertebrate fossil embedded in Martian rock, it would mean that a Cambrian explosion occurred twice in the same solar system. It would give us reason to suspect that nature is very good at knitting atoms into complex animal life, but very bad at nurturing star-hopping civilisations. It would make it less likely that humans have already slipped through the trap whose jaws keep our skies lifeless. It would be an omen. http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/ross-andersen-human-extinction/

Some Flowers Will Evolve to be Truthful

[Flowers] that carpet a field and require multiple visits from pollinators will evolve to be truthful, because they cannot afford to deceive their pollinators.

–Ed Yong, Bees Can Sense the Electric Fields of Flowers in National Geographic

In Memory of Claudia

My little bird, Claudia, passed away today. She was a spunky, beautiful, loving parakeet filled with song and vivacity. When let out of her cage, she would swoop and dive bomb about our apartment, a little green hornet.

She had the softest tiny belly. She loved sitting on my shoulder, grooming me.

We got her to provide companionship for my white-fronted Amazon parrot, Vincent, whom I’ve had since I was a little kid in San Diego.

She loved Vinnie as much as we do, and would selflessly groom his forehead and sing to him. She would boss him about and eat the food out of his bowl.

Four years ago, we purchased Claudia from a Pet Co downtown and brought her back all the way home on the A train.

In the middle of the night in one of the first months after we’d gotten her, she somehow got herself skewered–literally–on a toy hanging up in her cage. She was hooked onto it like a fish, flapping around in pain and fear. We managed to disentangle her, and I poured hydrogen peroxide on her wound.

We were terrified over the course of that week that she would die, but she was resilient. She was a tough little one. My NY bird.

Because of this resiliency, when she began getting sick over the past month, we didn’t think much of it. I was worried, of course, but I assumed that she would pull through whatever was ailing her.

And she did seem to get better, for a while. But suddenly today, she took a drastic turn for the worse. She was having difficulty breathing, and eventually moved to the floor of her cage, hiding under her food bowl.

When a bird does that, you know things are bad. Birds are good at hiding when they are really sick.

She passed away before my eyes this evening. It was awful. There was nothing I could do to help her.

Whenever I tell people that I have birds as pets, they seem to think it’s weird. And I’m sure that it must seem silly to you to grieve over a parakeet. But birds are wonderful pets. They have vibrant, unique personalities and are filled with the joy of living.

My wife and I have been sobbing all night, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I loved that little bird. And I am going to miss her terribly.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 23,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 5 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

In a Sense

Today we forced ourselves to take the train northwards, out of the gridlock reach of the city, to visit an acquaintance and a museum in a small town with one main street called Main St.

As we wandered the vast warehouse expanse of “modern” art, I reflected on how some pieces seemed calculated to create a sense of alienation, even disgust, in the viewer. What is the purpose of this sheet of metal laying in the middle of a room? What is the purpose of this room filled with paintings of stripes of off white colors? I don’t get works of art like this. There’s something infantile, inaccessible, or passive-agressive about them, in that whatever meaning meant to be constructed is either entirely within the mind of the artist, or peevishly left to be determined by the viewer. The intention of some of the pieces were interesting in a sort of anthropological way, in that they took ordinary objects or materials and attempted perhaps to heighten attention on what constitutes the ordinary, either by way of transplanting them into a gallery, or by way of transforming them into distorted mutant and hybrid objects.

Other pieces were more playful or contained elements of awe, beauty, or surprise that made them much more palatable to non-modern-artistic senses such as mine. Perhaps that means I am just not immersed enough in the lingo and arcana of the visual arts to truly appreciate the more challenging pieces. Maybe I should just stick to Monet and pieces of art appealing to the eye and easily digestible without much further thought.

It’s not that I shrink from intellectual challenge, but I suppose I have never been one to be engaged by cold puzzles of logic, either. I can’t tolerate Sudoku or riddles for this reason. If I’m not engaged by either some deeper purpose, beauty, a sense of connectivity, or at least by just plain old physical engagement (artwork that lets you walk around inside it or on it is always cool), I don’t see the point in it.

Ultimately, art must engage the viewer by telling a story. The artists whose pieces are displayed in this museum are fortunate in that even the most isolated, passive-aggressive, or alienating pieces are united by the encompassing and beautiful layout of the museum itself. The story that is created by the viewer comes from walking around the museum and enjoying its expansive spaces. In some cases, the design and placement of the pieces in the warehouse were more powerful than the actual pieces themselves.

Doubt

To be reflective is to be filled with unending self-doubt.

There is a moment every day during which I consider whether teaching is the correct profession for me, whether I am too unyielding, too introverted, too unempathetic. Do I give everything I could possibly give? Am I incapable of extending myself further, or am I simply unwilling? Are my decisions best for my students, or best for me?

Such reckoning speaks to the quality of my colleagues, who push me everyday to consider whether the tack I take is the proper course. It speaks furthermore to the quality of my school environment and student body, challenging daily the strictures of my limited thought.

This self-doubt serves to partly explain the reluctance I have evidenced for writing during this–my fourth–school year, as to reflect on such weaknesses is like rubbing salt into an open wound. The other part of the explanation is that I have been exhausting my reserves in creating a curriculum which I have been stubbornly attempting to create from the ground up, as well as working as special education coordinator and learning the byzantine byways of special education service jargon, systems and regulations.

But such excuses will no longer serve. I am in danger of becoming complacent, fattened by the distance between my heart and my action. In recognition of this, I hereby resolve to be more reflective, even as it entails greater vulnerability, and may even take away from time I could be spending “being productive.”

There must be a balance.