Ask me whether what I have done is my life.

Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made,
Ask me whether what I have done is my life.
Others have come in their slow way into my thought,
and some have tried to help or to hurt:
Ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait.
We know the current is there, hidden;
and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say

William Stafford, (c) 1977

www.selfinjury.com/the_vent

For those of you blessed to not have experienced the reality of Ma Tech, a bit of insight to help in the description: there is no reality, only theory.

Reality comes later, I've been promised. The professor [insert any one of them here, it matters not] continually advertises how what we are doing now will lead to some very useful tools in the future. I finished last semester's course with the same question from ten years ago: "What did I just learn?"

Three weeks into Hydrology and I'm spending one hour between each class studying material that I'm pretty comfortable with, and 6 hours between each class trying to write a simple computer program to display the material.

Then there's Water Resources, a title that was randomly selected to help ensure students sign up for the course. The best face I can put on the course is that I think that I am being taught something that may help me in high-level computations of something in the future, assuming that I am involved with those computations for some reason. The first homework is a simple problem... except that it cannot be solved without computations... so let us venture into the world of computer programming again. While the general discussion topics are within conceptual grasp, I am 20+ hours into teaching myself MatLab, with not much working and little enery left.

I am hoping, praying, that somehow I both make it through this semester learning a bit of the class information, and (apparently) more importantly, how to program.

www.selfinjury.com

I just walked out of a Hydrology class at good ol' Ma Tech. I thought I knew what hydrology was. Thought I engaged in it on a regular basis at work. Thought I had actually taught others about the subject.
Apparently, I've been using the wrong word all these years, because what I thought was 'hydrology' must be something else. Today, in an hour of indecipherable rambling, I caught a glimpse of what the professor deemed as hydrology. Assuming he has the correct definition means that I don't know anything about hydrology, because I had no idea what he was talking about.
I am actually paying this place to make me feel dumb.

Vizzini: "Inconceivable!"
Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means"

facing your childhood fears

The Alan of the 80's was a bit different than the over-confident machismo you interact with today. Being the youngest kid in my neighborhood, and small for my age, I found myself partaking in the grand activity of watching others have fun.

For instance, I watched my friends conquer Zelda, play quarterback, pitch, pick first, cuss, talk about girls... I digress.

Not to say that there were no pleasures provided me. If anyone was needed to climb down into the storm basin to get the ball, I was your man (boy, I mean). Or, if a quick errand over to another's home to invite them out to play presented itself, and you could count on my fresh legs.

So it is now, at age 33, that I find myself faced with an enemy of all children of the 80's (that is, except for me, as I only watched other spew frustration): the Rubik's Cube. The Christmas present of my 8-year old daughter, who immediately asked her noble father to show her how to fix it. And seeing as though she still believes I hung the moon, I will spend the remainder of my natural born life tackling this object of wrath.

It is on.

Alexa is so easy

alexa is so easy to sass.

she told me to clean up and guess what i told her, WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME? and lexa gets angry.
( that is saying that i didn't want to do what alexa told me to do. she is not the boss of me.mommy is.)