Eight Days a Week

Have you ever worn the same shirt for everything you had to do outside the house for two or three days in row? Have you ever had this great scheme ruined by seeing someone at Wal-Mart that you are supposed to watch a movie with the next night? Well, don't tell the world, but I only have one non-dress shirt left. Seriously. My luck has held out for like a month: I never see the same people twice outside of work, but soon the inevitable will happen and laundry day will be forced upon me once again.

The Walrus and The Carpenter

I read far too little. As I prepare to teach 2-3 authors per week to my eighth graders I read a lot of mini-biographies (of varying credibility) on figures like Jean De La Fontaine (a French fable-writer), Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and Robert Service (the poet who wrote “The Cremation of Sam McGee). Learning that Lewis Carroll was reading Pilgrim's Progress at age 7 or that George Orwell had read every work of Charles Dickens before he was twenty, not as a matter of pride, but as a matter of course, I get the feeling that I'm already impossibly far behind. And I am.

I'm twenty-two and it's too late for me.

I could be content knowing that I probably read about ten times more than the average American (after all: it's not what you do, it's who you beat) but I'm not. I love the fact that I'm in a book club with friends from Hillsdale, but I'd like to doing a little more to close the gap between myself and the cultural standards of the past.

So, (and I'm especially talking to Mike, Pat, Kevin and Jose) I'd like to get something going where I can read great authors and discuss their works on a more regular basis. The idea came to me today of starting an “Essay of the Day” group, where we could each suggest one essay by a notable Western thinker every week and write a review to which the rest could respond. It wouldn't be much and definitely no more than one essay per week per person, but it would keep me intellectually engaged outside the classroom and I think I need something to get me involved in conversation with someone older than 14.

I took about 10 minutes yesterday (we were reading “The Walrus and The Carpenter”) to field all the arguments my students could come up with to prove to me that pigs didn't have wings. They were unable to overcome my logic,and the proverbial question of “whether pigs have wings” is still open for debate.

If you read this blog and would like to be a part of something like an “Essay of the Day” group, please leave a comment with your thoughts/suggestions and if there's an interest, I'll take the time to begin putting something together.

Also, I was looking through old files last night and, in addition to uncovering the full album of songs that I wrote in high school (I was emo before Death Cab was a twinkle in Atlantic Record's eye), I found the series of Microsoft Paint single-frame comics I made for my first (and ultimately ill-fated) blog. This was a favorite of mine: