Another BLAH!

My brain is flying around like a witch on a broom.

How do you keep your focus?

What sort of things can you think to do that

IRON out your brains creases

direct the jets of wind into a thrust

and not lose your momentum--

I admire your ability to do this and cannot

for the life of me--

maintain that pinpoint accuracy that

reads the groove of the

record called my life

Anger--for better or worse?

I have long held my anger as a part of myself--something that defines me.  In recent times I have found it useful to put aside anger, allowing me a broader ability to accept the world with less clouded a view.  However, I feel like my resolve is crumbling without it.  Where is that inner drive to fight injustice in the world?  How do I protect that innocence inside me if I don't shell it in forceful resolve?  And YES it's worth protecting.  Everyone should have it.  

So how do you separate the "good anger" towards injustice and stupid things you put yourself through from the "bad anger" that threatens to grow into a consuming force of its own?

Imago

Just got back from wikipedia. I was trying to answer a question one friend asked: what is the stage of development after chrysalis. Of course it's butterfly, but is there a standard biological term, we wondered?

The answer is imago. Imago is synonymous with the adult (sexually mature, winged) stage of development not just in butterflies, but in all Holometabola (Endopterygota), insects that undergo Holometabolism (metamorphosis).

These include: beetles, flies, lacewings, fleas, caddisflies, mosquitos, ants, bees, and of course butterflies. There are more, but you can just go to the link for a complete list.

So it's embryo (egg), larvae (caterpillar), pupa (chrysalis), and imago (adult).

Incidentally, the plural of imago is imagines.
Also, the pupa stage of a mosquito is called a 'tumbler', FYI.

Hamsterdam

A game to kill time and turn your grey matter soupy:

Start with the name of a country.
Merge it with the name of an animal.
Laugh

or alternately...

Start with the name of an animal
Merge it with the name of a country.
Chuckle-snort.

For example:

Hamsterdam



Japanda


(both of which are already in use on the internet)

...and Uz-gecko-stan


(which, incidently, is entirely new to the blogosphere!)

Enjoy!

Teaching Methodology

"I know the subject matter and I can convey it to children." This is all that the hiring people want to hear.

Why would a class full of 3rd graders want to do what I say they should do?

How do you build that trust?

Yee Haw

It has been a good couple of days.  I have been with friends and riding that wave of perpetual awareness of what I should be doing... you all know what I'm talking about.

If you feel like you're in the right place at the right time

Or if you have the option to do something, and you take it,

Or if you decide not to get on that airplane and it plummets out of the sky in a fiery blaze,

Or if you're walking through a crowd and you just feel right, and every move you make puts you in contact with another friend,

Or if you have the inkling to visit the childhood house of your friend (whom you haven't even thought about for a few months) and she happens to be visiting her folks for three hours before heading back to college (in another state).

What do you call these moments of 'synchronicity' in which everything is propelled along nicely, like you're surfing a wave of euphoria?  

I have it when I feel like I did something for someone else... and I like it. 

How to originate a "new" idea: Synthesizing Bruno's Mnemonics with Hegel's Dialectic Method

I've been reading various articles online to try and better understand what's been said in this book I'm reading.


The author painted an image, firstly, of Giordani Bruno (an italian philosopher from the 1500's). Bruno developed a mnemonic device to help him remember things. Good so far. The trick was to visualize a wheel. You simply think of the thing you want to memorize, affix it to your mental wheel, and leave it there. Then when you want to remember the thing (be it a name, factoid, date, or whatever) you could mentally rotate the wheel and...voila!


And here I'll stop until I re-read that section...