Today's Word: camp

Will Work for Fun

September 6, 2010 – 3:50 pm | Word Count: 642

It has been said that the best job is the one you’re so good at that you are paid well for doing it, but love doing so much that you’d work for free. I’ve also heard the advice, “Do what you love, then find someone to pay you for it.”

I do a lot of stuff for free. Fortunately, the job I get paid for gives me a lot of time off.

If I were paid to simply baby-sit each my 120 students, at the rate of ten dollars an hour, I would be making $1200 a day. Multiply that by 180 days, and my salary would be $216,000 for the year. Taxes would take some of that, but please don’t tell me teachers are overpaid. We have to love what we do, because most of us spend many more hours on it than we get paid for.

I have never gotten a dime for all the words I’ve written, but that’s probably fair, since most of them aren’t worth a dime. There’s a lot of competition in the writing arena; the odds of publishing a best-seller are slim. Much as I’d like to sell novels, I have to be content with writing them. I write because I like doing it. It gives me satisfaction to put a story together with words and sentences. Read More »

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Vacuum

September 5, 2010 – 10:33 am | Word Count: 788

When I saw today’s word, ‘vacuum,’ I thought, “Wow, I feel as if I’ve fallen into a vacuum. All my time and energy has been sucked into a black hole.” That was an interesting notion, but since I know little about physics, an extended metaphor was out of the question.

But I’ve been thinking about my blogs and writing on the internet. The internet isn’t literally a vacuum, but a lot of of writing gets sucked into it and is never seen by human eyes.

I often feel that way about the things I write in my blogs. I’ve been missing online for a few weeks because of real world stuff, and the vast expanses of internet space have not missed me. I am one tiny twinkle, a small star occasionally spotted, but not significant.

Why do people write in blogs?

Obviously people write to be heard by an audience, or they would just write in a private diary. Some people treat their blogs that way, never opening them to other eyes.

I keep a journal, too. I jot down ideas, complain about things, record the mundane details of my life. I like going back and reading what I was thinking about a few months ago, or what was going on in my life. I write so much that I often forget ideas that I had, and rediscovering them is always interesting.

But I publish in several blogs as well. This is a different kind of writing from a journal. At times it’s like speaking to an empty auditorium. Read More »

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Laminated Lives

August 7, 2010 – 10:28 am | Word Count: 533

I used to think I would eventually be able to laminate my life — the sum of my experience. Since I would know everything by then, I could just wipe it off and follow the directions when something came up.

It hasn’t happened, of course. Every time I think I have it all figured out, it turns out that there’s another lesson to learn.

I like learning new things, which is a good thing because I’m a teacher. And one of the things I’m always learning is that people have to make mistakes in order to learn.

Unfortunately, we tend to view mistakes as things to be avoided, and we think that we can teach people not to make them by handing them our own laminated experiences.

Some kids appear to have been taught this early on. In my classes I often observe a fear of making mistakes — don’t write on your worksheet until someone gives you the right answer, copy the smart kid’s homework because then it will be correct. And they don’t learn the lessons they need to be learning — that doing something right requires effort, and that failures are just part of the process of finally getting it right.   Read More »

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Simplicity is Not Easy

August 1, 2010 – 9:23 am | Word Count: 619

Life should be simpler. It is my goal to make it so.

To that end, I have accumulated scads of books and software. How much is ‘scads’? Technically, one scad is already more than anyone needs. Having several scads means that you have started to use the piles of books as handy places to toss the mail or leave your keys. Having scads of software means that figuring out how to use these programs is a full time job.

Simplicity strongly appeals to me, but acquisition is a fixed habit. I would love to get rid of some things, but I would probably just end up buying them again when I find some use for them.

What is the goal of simplicity? Less stress. What causes stress? Change. The simplest thing to do would be to leave everything as it is.

But clutter is also stressful — at least to me it is. And the cure for clutter is a garage sale — a most stressful event.

I’ve had garage sales. My advice is this: Take all the things you’ve decided to get rid of, put them all on the curb, and then leave town for two weeks. When you return, much of it will have magically disappeared. Put trash stickers on what’s left. You won’t get any money this way, but you will save a lot of time. And time is worth something. Read More »

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Road Trip

July 30, 2010 – 8:36 am | Word Count: 495

Where are you going today? Where will your journey take you?

The word ‘journey’ is related to the word ‘journal.’ Both of them come from the Latin ‘diurnus,’ daily. A journey used to mean a day’s travel or work.

So, where have I been today? All over the world.

In a day I can see what the Gulf of Mexico looks like today, read email from my son in Japan, share my short story with people in Australia and Africa, and buy soap from Turkey.

I can go back in time, looking up my family’s genealogy or finding out who discovered radio waves. I can travel forward in time, reading what the stock market might look like tomorrow, or what schools might look like in a decade. In a day, I can see and learn a lot.

I am just old enough that all of this still amazes me. I will never forget when I got my first modem hooked up and found my way onto the internet. At that time there was not so much to see in cyberspace, but the idea of talking with people from all around the world without ever meeting them was intriguing.

But none of these daily journeys can compare to the real thing. I love getting ready to go on a trip.   Read More »

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Sympathy for the Devil

July 29, 2010 – 8:51 pm | Word Count: 576

You keep buying all those vampire books — Interview with a Vampire, Twilight. There are even several genres – Vampire Romance, Vampire Fantasy, Vampire Self-Help.

Well maybe not that last one. But give it time. It has already become an addiction. I’m sure there are vampires out there who want to break the blood-sucking habit.

Even werewolves are benefiting from the fad. No longer just a feral guy with a fuzzy face, the werewolf has become a sex symbol.

Question teenage girls are asking themselves: would I rather date a vampire or a werewolf?

Why do you love vampires and werewolves so much? I’m waiting for my turn. It won’t be long now, I think, before we devils get our due.   Read More »

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Ocean

July 24, 2010 – 8:05 am | Word Count: 558

One of my earliest memories is of being knocked down by a wave at Cannon Beach, Oregon. Though I now find myself marooned in the midlands of this country, I have lived much of my life near the ocean.

It’s easy to forget what a watery world we live in, since we spend most of it on dry land. More than two-thirds of the earth’s surface is ocean, and much of the planet’s life can be found there. We know more about the moon than we do about all the depths of the ocean, with its unseen mountains and invisible rivers.

The ancients believed that the ocean was a great river encircling the world, which they thought of as one land mass. In the middle of the lands was the Mediterranean Sea – literally, the ‘sea in the middle of the lands.’ In some mythologies, the ocean not only surrounded the land on all sides, but formed a great dome over the earth as well.

When God created the earth, he had to separate the land from all this water, just as he separated the light from the darkness. Whenever I heard this story as a child, I used to imagine God with a giant sieve, filtering sand from the water as I did at the beach with my small sieve, making mountains from the wet sand.

There is something infinite and terrible about the ocean.

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My Friend, Roget

July 22, 2010 – 8:47 am | Word Count: 706

One of the great treasures that anyone can plunder is the English language. By most estimates, there are around a million words in our language, many of them borrowed directly from other languages without change, and many more borrowed and Anglicized. If the speakers of Old English had kept out the Normans and resisted Latinization, we would be speaking a far narrower language. As it is, we have the largest lexicon of any language in the world.

Where many other languages have one word, we sometimes have five or six. To understand all the nuances of each choice and the proper context for using them can take a lifetime. This makes learning English well a difficult project.

But English grammar, while bizarre in its own way, is actually fairly simple. It has many irregular forms, but hardly any tedious endings to memorize. Anyone who has studied Spanish or French or Latin knows what a struggle it is to learn all the forms of an ordinary verb like “do” – six personal endings, six tenses, 36 forms. And that doesn’t include the passive or subjunctive forms. This paucity of inflection makes learning to “get by” in English a fairly easy task.

Mark Peter Roget wrote one of my favorite books. He called it Thesaurus, meaning ‘treasure’ in Greek.

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On the Eyebrow of the Storm

July 21, 2010 – 9:24 am | Word Count: 719

We were driving home from a retirement reception. It was a Sunday afternoon in September, two years ago. While we were inside the church, we could hear the wind getting stronger and stronger. Then we saw shingles start to fly off the roof.

Time to leave, we decided. It was obviously going to be a big storm, but we get that a lot in the fall. Hurricanes are always dragging their tails across Ohio after spending all their rage on the Gulf Coast.

On the way home, as we drove by the golf course, we saw debris flying across the road. Flying — in a straight line, as if it were coming out of a wind tunnel. I had never seen anything like that before. There were huge branches in yards and in the street, and a few trees were down.

Still the wind roared. At home, we stood out on the porch, looking up at the sky, watching the trees being whipped by the storm. There wasn’t much rain, as I recall. Just wind. We looked for funnel clouds, but there were none.

Predictably, our lights went out.

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In the Blizzard

July 20, 2010 – 9:33 am | Word Count: 549

I have seven identities, none of them stolen. They don’t all have credit cards or Social Security Numbers. They are personas, online masks I wear to avoid sharing my real identity. It’s not that I worry about my identity being stolen — you don’t have to go online to be robbed in the modern sense of the word.

I started creating online personas because in the real world, I can’t say whatever I want. There are real consequences in life for opinions and ideas, and while it is a good thing to speak your mind, it isn’t always a practical thing to do.

Politicians know this all too well. You can be the most obscure congressman from the most remote district, but if you say something sufficiently idiotic or outrageous, you will become a sound-byte on television, be You-Tubed, and get mega-hits on Google. And probably end up resigning. Sad, but true.

A person who uses their real name or Social Security number on the internet is lining up to be a victim.  It’s much better to be somewhat anonymous – hence the personas.

But even if they can’t apply for a Social Security number or a credit card, a persona can acquire a personality and a reputation. It’s very hard to write anything or interact with other people without sharing glimpses of identity.

People who are banned from an internet forum very often create a new identity and return to terrorize the boards once more.

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Dirt Always Wins

July 18, 2010 – 3:42 pm | Word Count: 572

I’m cleaning my house. Not because I’m a neat person, though I am. Sort of. Not because I like cleaning; I don’t. I’m cleaning because company’s arriving tonight, and I hate to make a bad impression.

They are relatives, not likely to judge us harshly if they find a smudge on the mirror. And it’s not as if we’re going to be on the Good Housekeeping channel or something. We are average people; our home reflects a healthy balance between work and play, with cleaning entering our frame of reference only when stuff starts to get in the way of work and play. If we can’t find the bottle opener, it’s time to clean.

When I am not thinking about cleaning (which is most of the time) it seems pretty neat around here. There are always clean dishes, and junk mail generally finds it way into the recycling bin before the table disappears. A bit of clutter, but not an avalanche. Things don’t get lost (very often). And if they do, it doesn’t take weeks to find them.

This is my philosophy of housekeeping. If no one’s complaining, ignore the mess.

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On the Air

July 17, 2010 – 8:51 am | Word Count: 571

A transistor radio was a pretty cool thing to have when I was in junior high. People carried them around, listening to whatever was on the air.

77WABC was what we listened to mostly. Cousin Brucie was on in the afternoon. He didn’t need anyone to exchange barbs or get goofy with. DJ’s worked alone then, introducing the songs, doing ads, and talking to the listening audience as if we were all friends. I had no idea what Cousin Brucie looked like, but I felt like I knew him.

If an iPod is your medium for music, you have no idea what you’ve missed. I used to listen to the radio for hours, waiting for him to play a certain song, trying to get the lyrics this time. If I turn it off and go to bed, I thought, that’s when he’ll play Incense and Peppermints. So I stayed up, listening, but they just played Judy in Disguise again.

I had 45’s (singles), but it wasn’t the same; if it played on the air, I knew that people all over the Metro-New York area were listening at the same time. Read More »

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Worms, Candles, and Clocks

July 16, 2010 – 9:27 am | Word Count: 678

Night owls always marry early birds, so people say. People also say, “Birds of a feather flock together.” I suppose that both of these can be true, for there is certainly more to a person than when their alarm clock goes off.

Whether or not the early bird gets the worm, I am always up early — even on weekends, even in the summer when I don’t work. Worms don’t interest me, or whatever they metaphorically represent (money? opportunities? door-buster sales?). I get up because I wake up, and I don’t like wasting time lying in bed.

I am married to a night owl. The nature of our jobs is different; I have to get up early, and it’s become a habit. He often works in the evenings, gets home late, and needs time to wind down.

For me, evenings are a countdown to bed – how long can I keep my eyes open? No new ideas, no productive thoughts occur to me after four in the afternoon. The following day has to be planned to the smallest detail before I head home from work, or I will forget half of the things I need to do. There are evenings when I would happily crawl in bed at eight, but I stay up to chat with the night owls.

My best time of day is early morning. I share a house with night owls (except during hunting season), so it’s always quiet. I can putter around, sit and write, have another cup of tea. In the summer, mornings are the only cool time to sit outdoors.

Are morning people fundamentally different from night people? Read More »

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