From the depths of work weekend from hell, hour 23, thank the lord for good music.
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So I'm not a total John Vanderslice devotee but the set he did for OPB Music this week is worth your time.
I'm particularly fond of the first and fourth tracks. Is it just me, or is Numbered Lithograph straight the hell out of 2003?
It doesn't take too long to get back into the writing rhythm: the slow piecing-together of concepts into a narrative whole. The pages aren't quite flying by, but I'm getting somewhere. Getting closer. Trying and failing and trying and succeeding, steps forward and steps back.
Twenty-one pages down, at least twenty to go.
(from a local restaurant's newsletter, some kind words)
This week’s doff of the toque goes to....
Our collective kitchen hats are off this week to Gorge Grown Food Network’s own wonder gal, Sarah ---------------. Sarah, whose title is “coordinator,” has actually been sighted at three different locations at the same time. Or maybe it just seems that way. Whether it’s signing up new members, running the Sunday mobile market, or putting on the little picnic for 200 last Sunday at Idiot’s Grace, Sarah is just amazing. Rumor has it she even coaxes the tomatoes and raspberries into longer growing seasons. Thanks, Sarah, for all you do to help us eat local and delicious.
10:30 PM, still at work. This report is slowly coming together. Slowly. Don't look to hear much from me until I get through it. Things are pretty intense around here.
And thanks, many thanks, to both Seal and Pam for the reminder to re-read David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon commencement address.
He will be missed.
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
This is just about the only thing keeping me alive and well right now. On steady repeat.
(James Yorkston cover; I love that JY. Sadly, you can only buy it if you buy the giant box set of JY goodies. This does not jive well with my current desperate need to Own Less Stuff.)
Staring down the barrel of a terrifying deadline next week - and this comes after pulling off a 250 person fundraising dinner on Sunday and working through yesterday's painful dizzy stress hangover. Thank goodness N made me dinner. Must meet the deadline, then must turn around and make one more mobile market run, then one more community meal, then one more real work week. Will not get a full day off until October 4. And then the next day I fly to Philly for a conference. There's nothing to be done about it but barrel through and keep looking to the other side.
I wish I had a way to download this, because it's one of my favorite songs, and this is a stellar cover. Listen for the crickets.
I was disappointed to learn today that both the Obama and Biden children attend(ed) private schools.
My thoughts, almost exactly:
So it is with huge grief-filled disappointment that I discovered that the Obamas send their children to the University of Chicago Laboratory School (by 5th grade, tuition equals $20,286 a year). The school’s Web site quotes all that ridiculous John Dewey nonsense about developing character while, of course, isolating your children from the poor. A pox on them and, while we’re at it, a pox on John Dewey! I’m sick to death of those inspirational Dewey quotes littering the Web sites of $20,000-plus-a-year private schools, all those gentle duo-tone-photographed murmurings about “building critical thinking and fostering democratic citizenship” in their cherished students, living large on their $20,000-a-year island.
What the hell, people. This one pisses me off every time. There's not a damn thing wrong with sending your child to public school.
(full story here)
Got a scholarship to the CFSC conference in October! I'm comin' to Philly!
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