Feb 11, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
My daughter is happily singing this song by They Might be Giants while making her bed in her room (she’s now used to doing it, and I’m mighty pleased about that). She’s a happy child, and I love the occasional up-shifts in key, so carefree, so unself-conscious! I know she revels in the strangeness of the lyrics (she knows about the Mesopotamians, because her mom, unable to let a teaching moment go waste, told her all about them a couple of years ago. To her credit, she wanted to know).
And as I hear this song about Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh and Sargon, I remember “Ozymandias” by P.B. Shelley, and remember “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” and imagine how, behind the “vast and trunkless legs of stone” in that poetic desert, the “lone and level sands” stretch far away. Then, I look at my calamitous clutter of corrected and uncorrected student papers, and feel a moment’s spasm of rebellion: Why work? Nothing survives.
Of course, I know why. It’s work, silly!
I have a Snow Day today. Like a child, I rejoice, but then soberly contemplate the gritty pile of student writing that I have yet to plough through. Work!!
Still, there’s play, and raccoons in our backyard in the summer, and love, and laughter, lots of good food, great music to play, a child who gets jokes and profound ideas, who laughs and spins and reads and thinks, and loves us unconditionally, and who’s kind to everyone, and a loving husband, who’s kind and hard-working and funny and creative beyond all imagining, and students who are wonderful, hard-working and thoughtful, and friends who are kindred spirits, and my mother who is the well-spring of love and devotion and the epitome of hard-work, and a sister and bother who are good and loyal and hard-working and fearless, and I have all those unwritten stories and poems, and finally, all those dreams waiting me on the far shores of sleep.
Looking back on this run-on sentence, I see one hyphenated word that jumps out at me, like a monkey from a tree (just felt like using that simile. You don’t like it? Ah, well. Better luck next time). What word? You guessed it: Hard-working!
Work! Work! Work! says the monkey on my back.
I’d better get back to working hard. I’ve not much time to waste.
So much to be happy about in the midst of so much work in the world!
Tags: Ashurbanipal, Gilgamesh, Grading Papers, Hammurabi, Ozymandias, Sargon, Snow Days, Thankfulness, They Might Be Giants, We're the Mesopotamians, Work
Feb 11, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning
Words create an alternate reality.
This is how we re-create our passing seconds, minutes, hours, years. Forever sloughing off our past selves, we clutch at a memory of what we thought we were, and re-build it lovingly, hoping to freeze-frame it. How much of it is Platonically real?
I like it, though.
My worded reality offers more nuance, or a more ordered, less chaotic, more neatly arranged nuance to the setting of my days.
We all know this secret — life truly has no meaning. Life’s meaning is always sculpted by us, its artisans.
So, today went by. There was some work, some food, some musing, some sledding with daughter, some lazing, some blogging, and now, in a few minutes, more work. Soon, there will be some music together, some hugs and kisses, daughter’s bedtime, and more work before we retire for the night.
So, it will go. And I will have not much to show for it, except memories which will be overlaid with more memories, and this, the sum of my day today.
It was fun while it lasted.
If I didn’t want to have a Hindu death ceremony at the end of my life (many decades from now, don’t worry!) I would opt, instead, for a grave, on which would be inscribed this epitaph: Yes, it was fun while it lasted.
Tags: alternate reality, Epitaph, reality, the meaning of life