Yellow

There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.

Mary Oliver

Stuff White People Like?

Calling someone a "douchebag" or a "doosh" is just not in my lexicon of regularly used insults. Neither do I know many people who call other people such a thing. I think the first time I heard someone use that was when I was watching "The Royal Tennenbaums," a movie whose wide-spread appeal I had difficulty understanding. It wasn't until a few years later when I came across the website "Stuff White People Like" and saw that Wes Anderson films were on the list that it clicked. So I wonder is calling someone a "douchebag" also a white person thing? Or maybe it's a generational thing, as in it skipped Gen X? In a highly non-scientific poll around the lunch room, the other person roughly my age also did not use said epithet whereas the person roughly ten years older as well as the person roughly ten years younger did.

On a related note, my co-worker who is a beekeeper working as a singer working as a pottery instructor said that our biology co-worker was talking about douching in class one day and said during his lecture that "douching monkeys around with the natural bacteria down there" to which a student replied, "What are douching monkeys?" Students. Gotta love 'em.

On another related note, my co-worker who thinks every abstruse thing (not to be confused with obtuse as you can see here) should be a band name thought that "Douching Monkeys" would make a good band name.

I heart succulents

I heart succulents and seeing them as vertical gardens makes them even more heart-worthy!



Flora Grubb Nursery designed these vertical succulent gardens and you can get containers from their Web store to make your own. They also have a floral design department called The Cutting Garden and do some lovely work for special events. Check out these gorgeous bridal bouquets and headpieces incorporating (you guessed it!) succulents:






It's enough to make a girl want to get married!
I think I'll just go buy some succulents instead.

I want to go to Cuba!

Cuba was never a place that particularly interested me, probably because I don't smoke cigars, and it's not easily accessible to most of us living in the US.




However, I recently watched a film called "The Power of Community" which is about Cuba during the mid-90s when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba lost access to half its petroleum and 80% of its food. The average Cuban lost 20 pounds in the next 4 years as the country scrambled to find ways to feed, house, and transport its people without the easy access to petroleum they previously had. The results are astonishing; 80% of produce grown in Cuba is now organic, they use about 1/8th of the petroleum they used to, and many people have become healthier due to an increase in vegetables and fruits in their diets as well as more exercise through bicycling and public transit.





As the world hits Peak Oil and as various current events around the world show, Americans' access to cheap oil may be coming to an end and if we don't begin to take proactive steps towards curbing our consumption, we may end up in a pretty dire situation like Cuba was in the 90s. Of course this "disaster" turned out to be for the better in many ways for them and perhaps it will be the only way that we Americans will begin to understand that the American way of life as is just isn't sustainable.

The Perks of Being a Public Employee

Our school has finally decided to come up with a policy defining what is "acceptable" behavior between an instructor and his/her student as well as employees and their supervisors on our college campus. The college has been in existence well over 60 years and I have no idea why it is only now that they have this policy. Perhaps previously these sorts of moral boundaries were assumed to be mutual. Certainly our college has had its share of drama so I presume that as with most rules that it is a reactive rather than proactive act.

I took a look at the policy when it came out in its first draft and it said what I would have presumed it to: student-instructor relationships are prohibited as well as employee-supervisor relationships. If two people decide to be in a relationship together, then they must wait until the unequal power dynamic is removed to proceed. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. But a few weeks later, based on what is no doubt a committee of the ineffectual's feedback, the rules had changed. My dean informed me that it was now fine to be in a relationship with a student "as long as you tell the dean when it has reached relationship status." Serious?!? There are so many levels upon which this seems wrong. So I asked for clarification. Our conversation went something like this:

Me: So if it's just a hook up or booty call, not a relationship, then we don't have to tell you?
Dean: (long pause) No, you still have to tell me.

At least my dean has a good sense of humor.

It's helpful to be able to see when taking an online class

One of my online students today was having trouble finding an assignment in our class. She emailed me and sent me screen shots of where she was looking. By seeing the screen shots, I could see that she was looking in the wrong folder; hence, she couldn't find the document. I emailed her back letting her know to look in the correct folder and no reply. I assumed the problem was solved.

Today, she emails me again with the same question. She could not find the document for the assignment due today. I told her to just call me as clearly she wasn't seeing what I meant. Little did I know how true that was, literally. When I finally spoke to her, she told me that she had to have eye surgery recently and couldn't really see. And that's why she couldn't find the document or for that matter, read the emails I'd sent her instructing where she should look.

Now not being able to see would be really a nuisance in a traditional face-to-face class but at least a person could get some direct instruction and help. But in an online class? Where you have to read EVERYTHING in order to do the assignments? Sometimes I just don't get students....

A Sieve Like Mine

My father is prone to fits of forgetfulness. For example, I will ask him a question and in mid-reply, literally, he will stop talking and turn around and do something else, as if I had never asked him a questions. I used to get extremely perplexed about this. Had he just gotten distracted mid-sentence and was thinking of something else before replying? So I would wait an appropriate amount of time before prompting him with a sometimes impatient, "Yeah?!?" to which he'd often reply with a completely blank look. The odds are not good that my memory will be much better.

As such, A Sieve Like Mine will be my attempt to develop a virtual steel-trap mind to compensate for the sieve-like one genetics and environment has bestowed upon me. Interestingly enough, my co-worker who is one with the ability to recite long lines of poetry and scientific nomenclature from memory has remarked that he found that having virtually a photographic memory was more a curse simply because he is unable to forget the bad along with the good. So I suppose I can count my blessings in that way.

I plan to take note of the various things I observe and learn along the way in this life. As such, A Sieve Like Mine will probably be as random and associative as our experiences, memories, and lives tend to be, hopefully wonderfully so.