Friday
Doesn't it make sense to use the <H1> and <H2> tags here instead of <BIG> and <STRONG>? I got into the habit of using <STRONG> for section headings on Advogato.
My arms really hurt, from moving a filing cabinet last weekend and then typing during the week.
I noticed that RyanMuldoon on Advogato was a co-founder of the ARHS network, with Gabe Ricard, whom I met and corresponded with a bit when I visited ARHS in 1999. It's quite likely that I actually met Ryan, too. Their advisor in this undertaking was Peggy Westcott, who was my computer teacher in elementary school at the Smith College Campus School. (She taught Logo to 4th through 6th graders, including the really exciting LegoLogo unit in 6th grade, to which I looked forward for years and about which I once had a very dramatic dream. It was a dark and stormy night and a few of us, students all, took shelter at Peggy's house, where she let us do experiments with LegoLogo. I think I had that dream in 5th grade, and I wish I could remember who the other students in the dream were, because I have a guess.)
Peggy was a computer teacher at ARHS (one of the best public high schools in Massachusetts) after that, and she had a group of really motivated students who set up a network with a Linux box and did technology projects. I am very much reminded of GEECS, and it seems to me that every high school should have a project somehow along these lines, if students are interested.
After work, in Jamba Juice, I heard the song "Closer to Fine" by the Indigo Girls on the radio, but I think it was more like "closer to crying" for me, because it made me want to cry.
I went to the doctor, I went to the mountain
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There's more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine
I guess I've done all of those things lately except for drinking from the fountain. The Indigo Girls continue:
I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
so when I walked out of Jamba Juice, closer to crying, I thought "Everybody's looking for salvation" but also that I was unlikely to ever have a Ph.D or a beard to my knee -- where other times I seemed to be on track for both of those things.
Well, I remembered the bit from Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey:
Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
I liked this because I always associated ignorance with cruelty and knowledge or certainty with kindness. But the Indigo Girls associate ignorance and uncertainty with health, which would certainly have been anathema to me once. (I suppose there are other ways of reading that Wilder quotation, like associating polytheism with cruelty and monotheism with kindness.)
If we take the straightforward interpretation of the list of activities in "Closer to Fine" as metaphorical for all the things that people attempt or look to in order to find meaning, health, happiness, or wisdom, then I think it's easy for anyone to sympathize with the story in that song. Sure, the list there is pretty "New Agey", for the most part. (It does mention the Bible later on, and a "revival", presumably mixing some Christianity together with mountains and fountains in the catalogue of salvationist technique.) But the message of the song is "I did x, y, and z, and nothing worked" (but now the person to whom the song is addressed has allowed the singer to feel more comfortable with ignorance and thereby "closer to fine"). Well!
