It's Taylor Mali Time

As I head back to school after spring break, I need a little pep talk.

Help me, Taylor Mali:



Thank you, sir.

No Preventive Maintenance for You!

A tree in my yard was hit by lightning last summer. It subsequently died.

I confirmed with my insurance agent this morning that removal of the dead tree is not covered under my policy. That's maintenance.

However, if the tree falls and hits my house, I am covered. That's a claim.

Shall I wait?

Springtime in Walmart

I stopped by Walmart this morning to get something I didn't actually find.

The weather has done a welcome about-face here, and today's high should be 74. The forecast for the rest of the week is even better.

Sunshine, open windows, birds singing....our thoughts turn to flowers, and retailers know it. I spent a very long time looking at the tulips this morning, weighing the pros and cons of taking some home. In the end, I decided that I could take them all home without having to choose one color over the other or damaging my debit card.

And so I did. But because I'm generous, I'm sharing.

Here are your tulips. Happy spring!

As I Am an Honest Puck, or, Just One Time Let Me Put This on a Student's Paper...

Incoherent.

Incomprehensible.

Nonsense.

Babbling.

Rubbish.

English?????

Are you sure you read the story?

I grade your paper sober. I would appreciate your doing me the courtesy of writing it that way.

(Should a student ever happen upon this blog, know that I love you, and only the occasional paper drives me to this level of despair. If you can read this, you didn't write that paper.)

Groundhog Day

Today I wake up, survey the disaster that is my home, organize the stack of papers to be graded, grade. With some luck, I'll pull out a few hours to work on the disaster that is my home.

Tomorrow, I wake up, survey the disaster that is my home, organize the stack of papers to be graded, grade. With some luck, I'll pull out a few hours to work on the disaster that is my home.

Monday, I wake up, survey the disaster that is my home, organize the stack of papers to be graded, grade. With some luck, I'll pull out a few hours to work on the disaster that is my home.

It's good to have a plan.

Who Am I This Time?

Kurt Vonnegut's classic story "Who Am I This Time?" features a woman new in town looking to make friends and fit in, so she joins a community theater company. There she meets a painfully shy and awkward man who becomes someone else entirely when he plays Stanley Kowalski to her Stella. Yet, is he really someone else, or is he the man inside who has up to then been too shy to emerge? The film version stars Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken, a pair of actors who managed to get a few more jobs after that one.

I'm not necessarily looking to make friends since I have a swell collection of them, but if anything is true of the intertubes, it's that friendships do form between the bits and the bytes. If new friends happen along, welcome.

In the meantime, I'm musing about my own intentions in starting this blog. I'm probably kidding myself if I think I have time to maintain it, but as a recent convert to Facebook, I'm interested in a medium that allows for communication with my friends and family....but without character limits.

So, here's the blog, but now I have to consider the question: Who am I this time? More sophisticated and/or sensitive writers recognize that any piece of writing, especially personal writing, calls for the writer to take on a persona. Am I silly, stuffy, sanguine, garrulous, groggy, grumpy, professorial, pissed off, polished? (Or just showing off my vocabulary?) How much of myself do I reveal? Regardless of the form of communication, we humans always offer parts of ourselves while keeping other parts hidden. (And frequently we reveal other parts unwittingly.) Where is the line between what I have and what you get? Where should the line be?

Vonnegut's story questions the nature of identity and acknowledges that who we are on the inside doesn't always correspond with who we are on the outside (or how others perceive that outside us). Who I am on the blog may or may not correspond with who I am on the outside (or who you think I am). Let's find out.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Somehow I suspect that this post title has been used before by someone, somewhere.

I have built it, on the easy and cheap.

Let's see who drops in.