Sunday, August 7, 2016

two things and an offer

thing one: It's the end of summer break and it's been a wonderful summer.  I did some art thinking at the beginning of break but my brain has been in idle for a couple of months now.  I need to be able to have coherent thoughts soon.  I need to sharpen my brain for some critical thinking and teaching soon.  Conversation and discussion helps.  I'll confess that I sometimes have these conversations and discussions with myself.  Since you probably do this too, you'll understand that these self talks are best when you have time alone.  We tend to look insane when other humans see us walking around asking ourselves questions and then answering.  Since I don't want my kids thinking I'm any more insane than they may already think I am...and since G has already had discussions with me about everything I know, it might be a good idea to solicit conversations from others.  But since I'm not a fan of "people" and I love being a hermit, that can be tricky.

think two: We used to write letters.  Long, beautifully well thought out letters to communicate our thoughts.  Then computers ruined the mail and we all forgot how to even write in cursive.  Even then, we communicated by email and found a perhaps more brief way of communicating our ideas to others.  For what was lost in personal handwriting, we gained speed.  Our sprinting fingers could stamp out a long email in minutes.  Maybe this wasn't best for gathering our thoughts, but it did allow us to say a great deal in a short amount of time.  Now we have these infernal phones and we don't even email.  We text only using our thumbs to pound each letter and we hate spelling out words to the extreme of using abbreviations and even emojis to communicate our "complex" thoughts to others.  Of course, we do still email, but only when we can't text and even then we don't want to go to the trouble of opening our laptops and seeing if the battery is still charged.  Instead we email with our thumbs on that tiny screen and we don't really communicate anything other than poop emojis.  Heck, you can even scroll down through the posts here and see that I lean much more heavily on photos now than words.

an offer: I invite you to email me and initiate a conversation and or discussion.  This can help kill two birds with one stone.  You can help me restart my brain in time for school and we can both be better humans by shunning brevity and embracing actual words and paragraphs.  If there's a topic you'd like to discuss, let's have it.  If you'd like to ask me my thoughts on something, go for it.  Care to know my thoughts on something as polarizing as religion?  I'm game.  Want to discuss something boring like art theory?  Let's go.  We can talk movies, music, running or whatever.  Oh, and I give great advice!  I just ask that you tell me who you are and share your thoughts as well.  

Ready?  Go.


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