A Weblog

Most of the guests had left. Like them, their host was drunk. Only the lights on the Christmas tree and the glow of his computer monitor filled the room. Otherwise it was quite dark and empty. It was cold out, blisteringly so, but it hadn’t yet snowed. If recent history was any indication, it wasn’t going to snow. Suddenly he had an epiphany. He would buy a ticket out of here, but to where? Where would he most rather be? The answer was simple: Scotland. And so without further hesitation, he purchased a ticket, but he was still alone.

The next morning, when the reality of what he had done the night before struck him, he asked two of friends, one of whom has a very common Scottish name for a girl, to accompany him. They did. One of them lost part of a tooth on a roundabout. The rest of him came back safely.

Jeanie, who had grown up in Scotland and made her way across the Pond to settle, laughed when she learnt how he made his way to Scotland, saying, “That is a great story.” Then she got into her car and left.

It seems that every time I go to church choir [this is once a week, on Thursdays], I end up talking to the choir director, who moonlights as the director of the music program for one the local school districts, about all that I find wrong in the world. Usuaully it’s secondary education that upsets me most — especially when there’s an educator nearby.

No Child Left Behind [PDF here] (NCLB) has already upset, as you might remember, because it very blindly replaced all the social, emotional, and physical and health education out of the Jump Start legislation organized by some very well-meaning and pretty smart people in the 1950s with a single word: literacy. This law is was just a clever political move. Give the public something they can hold onto, repeat quickly, and give it a name that sounds pleasant. I won’t rant about the artificial metrics the law forces on schools, or how these exams cannot be compared from state to state, and why the underlying principle of it is “Oh, yeah, you’re sick, huh? Well, you can’t have any medicine until you’re better.” Much like the abortion bill in South Dakota, NCLB lacks any foresight and doesn’t consider the consequences. But instead of being four pages, it’s 670.

And if you look on page 559, you will find the heading for SEC. 9528. Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information. There you will find tucked away very neatly a most disturbing consequence of this bill. Looks like someone was planning ahead after all:

“[E]ach local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act
shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings.”

This sort of thing happens all the time at colleges and universities. And sure, that almost makes sense. After all, kids there have gone through most of the developmental processes that deem them a functioning, thinking adult. Remember last summer when I almost took a commission in the navy to train nuclear engineers for subs and carriers? Well, while it’s hard to defend the military’s right to know my name and number, it’s almost undensible to do the same with sixth graders. And don’t think that because you’re at a private or religious school you’re not effected. There’s a good chance you are. I’d suggest that parents read subsection (c) and check with their kids’ schools.

My favorite part of this section comes last. Connecticut has consistently been a thorn in the Secretary of Education’s side. Last last summer, the state sued because the Secretary refused to grant a waiver for annual testing made mandatory by NCLB. Connecticut has had state-wide testing long before Bush came around. They had done such unreasonable things as wait until ESL students learn some English before forcing them to take the test, which, by the way, is conducted in English. The Department of Education didn’t like that and so denied them the waiver, requiring the state to spend millions just to develop the test in what would be over 150 languages. Throw in costs to administer and grade the things, and we’re talking several times what it costs to run an entire, medium-sized school district. I haven’t heard anything since last Connecticut’s case since last summer. I’d be curious to know if anyone else knows what’s happened since.

Anyway, I’m thinking about marching down to my old high school to ask if they’ve passed out a form for parents to easily refuse consent. Tonight’s after-choir conversation almost got me riled up enough to start an after-school math tutoring program there voluntarily. But then again, I might get for the city of Cambridge to do exactly the same thing. I’ll wait until after I receive an email.

It was New Years Eve. Liz and I didn’t know what else to do, and Heidi had insisted pretty strongly that we come. So we followed her and some of her friends whom we had never met before to a convenience store which we had driven by several times but where we had never before actually stopped. They stocked up on soda and chips and other snacks that seemed reasonable for a New Year’s celebration before heading for the highway. Once there, Liz and I took the lead. You see, there were enough of them to populate two partially full cars. We offered to take passengers in our car, but they declined. But there was a small problem. No one in Jay’s car knew how to get to Providence. I had recently been to cheer the women’s water polo team during their away game at Brown, and, so, had the directions fresh in my mind.

I kept pace with the rest of traffic; Jay followed behind. We slowed down several times at their request. It seems my maroon 1998 Dodge Stratus was more powerful that I thought.

We arrived at Heidi’s dad’s apartment, which he had graciously loaned to his daughter to ring in the new year, around nine o’clock. The place was dark — the walls were covered with panelling which gave the appearance of wood and distinct feel of the late 70s. The built-in shelves held knick-knacks and momentos: a few pictures of Heidi and her younger brother and sister, two Christmas cards, some glasses, a stack of receipts, and an ash tray. On the wall next to the shelves towards the kitchen he had taped up the deadbeat dads from the newspaper. Someone pointed to one of them and told me that Heidi’s dad knew him and that his particular case had complicated circumstances which cleared him from charges. With and with few obvious light sources in the parlor, we had little choice but to congregate in the tiny kitchen.

In the center was a oval table and a few mismatched chairs. Because standing meant standing next to someone and that meant socializing, I sat at the table. Rita sat across from me. We didn’t say anything. Instead, I turned my head up, as if to examine the ceiling and started to stroke my neck, starting with the chin, ending at the cavity in my chest just above my rib cage. Rita may’ve already been drunk. As soon as we arrived, everyone produced the secret stash of alcohol each had brought. Someone blasted Amber by 311. Instantly there was a loud roar of noise. This wasn’t singing; at least it was in unison. Liz and I didn’t know we were supposed to bring our own alcohol. I’m not sure that things would have been different had we known. I was driving and Liz didn’t plan on staying. Even still, no one likes the kids who don’t drink at a party where the purpose of going is solely to get drunk. They’d yell at us for that later. For now, Rita was mad at me for another reason.

“Stop it! Stop it, Josh. Stop calling me swan,” she demanded. I hadn’t said a word, and she had got it wrong.

“Rita, I’m not calling you a swan. I’m calling you a giraffe because in addition to your long neck, you have a monstrously long tongue,” I explained. Rita’s face got long, her eyes and mouth opened wide.

“Stop it! You’re being mean,” she said. And I was. There was no doubt about it. And for this, I apologize, Rita. I was clearly in the wrong. Kaitlyn, for no reason, other than upset Rita further, rallied to my defense.

“I don’t think Josh is being mean,” Kaitlyn interjected. She agreed, “You do have a long tongue.”

At this, Rita sprang from her seat, turned to Kaitlyn, and like a flash of lightning struck. Rita struck Kaitlyn’s forehead with the palm of her hand. Kaitlyn, who had been leaning against the wooden trim which lined door frame of the bedroom adjacent to the kitchen as she drank, fell back with a trendous force. There’s a good chance she would be concussive for the next several days, but certainly for that night. Upon realizing what she had done, Rita burst into tears, perhaps because of her unusual empathetic powers.

Liz had been talking to Paul about what it’s like to be a professional tree climber, and therefore missed Rita’s battery against Kaitlyn. After high school, he found a job as a landscaper. His specialty: trees.

Shortly after midnight Liz and I packed up for home. We took Mark back, too; he had to work in the morning. I stopped at a gas station in Pawtucket off the highway for fuel. Getting back on, I drove the wrong way on a one-way that connects to the exit. Since then, I’ve made the same mistake once, both times without incident.

Mark took us to Hanover. We weren’t terribly sure how to get home from there but managed not to get lost.

In response to yesterday’s post, I received an email asking if it meant that I “loved abortions.” I responded privately but there’s no reason not to respond publically. What I wrote had almost nothing to do with abortions. This may come as a suprise, especially when you consider the fact that the word appears eleven times. No friends, I not about to betray my opinions and hop on either of the anti-life and anti-choice bandwagons. What I wrote was an attack, though it was never explicitly stated, against the popular culture of immediate gratification.

This bill represented the easy-fix mantra that tends to destroy. Good things, I’m told, come to those who wait. I believe good things come to those who plan. If the writers of the bill want to ban abortions, fine, but think about the consequences first. I made no appeal to the sanctity of life, nor to a women’s right to choose, none of that. All I ask is that when you do something, anything, that has consequences, plan for them.

The representatives did not provide for the new babies. There was no mention of increased funds for medicare, increased low-income housing [the sad reality is that the poorer you are, the more likely this bill will effect you], increased money for education, for food stamps. The law doesn’t make any economic considerations, and neither is there accompanying legislation that does. That’s what I’m against. And it doesn’t matter if you’re for or against abortion, no one can be against responsible law-making.

The short-sightedness of the bill is what upsets me most, not its content. And that’s why I ask you to write a letter to the sponsors who moved the bill asking them to think about the consequences of what they’ve done. There’s a good chance they haven’t already done so. By next Monday I’ll post the letter I’ve sent to each of them so that the lazier among you have little excuse not to follow my lead.

South Dakota recently signed into law [it's not long, only a four-page read] legislation that puts all but a complete ban on abortion. It allows for it only in the most extreme cases which endanger the life of the woman and it denies action to women even in cases involving incest and rape. Coppertosteel first brought this to my attention, but you can also read about it at one of the many internet news sources here. Now, I’m not going to tell you based on some moral, anti- or pro-religious, or women’s rights argument that this is, perhaps, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read — and recently I read this book — don’t let the high customer rating fool you; if the emotionally exploitive nature of this book really compels you, I suggest that instead of reading it, you volunteer at some local non-profit.

According to the figures I found at the CDC and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the US abortion ratio in 2000 was about 25%. This statistic measures the number of legal abortions per live births. It is a composite figures that states voluntarily report to the centers [at least for the CDC]; some states choose not to report, some are very accurate, and, of course, some fall in between. The take home is this: the abortion ratio under-reports. Now, South Dakota has pretty much asked the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. And this legislation mentions scientific advancement since the Court last made its ruling. If the US banned abortions outright, which for the crude approximations I’m about to make should suffice, the abortion ratio tells us that about 1 million more babies would be born, and remember that number is low. We as a country pick up about 4 million babies each year any way. And here’s the kicker. We don’t have enough money to support them already.

Between the CDC and the AGI, it looks like single or unmarried women comprise close to 60% of those who have abortions [Curious stat: umarried women are 6 times more likely to have an abortion than married women], half of them are under 25, and 20% of them are under 19. I couldn’t easily find demographics on education or economic status, but from a lecture I went to at the Kennedy School in the fall, I can qualitatively tell you that the younger, less educated, and poorer a women is, the more likely she will not give up her baby to adoption. And the older, more educated, wealthier a women is the less likely she will even have a kid. The lecture did not mention abortion, but I’m willing to guess that whatever the numbers are we’re going to have to pour lots more money into the welfare state.

As it is, we have trouble taking care of our kids. There’s just not enough money to go around. The public education system is saturated. Abortions are highest [surprise] in the most populous states. The top three by incidence are New York, Florida, and Texas and rank second, third, and forth by population. South Dakota happens to be in the bottom four of both lists. [They reported just under 900 abortions of the 1 million reported in 1999.] These highly populated states will have to bear the brunt of the baby boom this law would incur. Just as a matter of resources, don’t change anything just yet. We can barely maintain status quo. As a potential educator, I’m terrified. I don’t know where we’d get more teachers, let alone qualified teachers. My pessimist leanings suggest we start building more prisons and raising funds. Once our schools fail these kids, tax payers will have to shell out about $22,650 per inmate if things stay the same according to the Bureau of Justice. The same report says that annually the prison system is a $38 billon industry. We need so many more teachers and jobs. [That same K-School lecture said we needed more highly skilled labor and turned to immigrants as a potential solution since our kids are too expensive to teach and because the success rate is so low. It's getting harder and harder to out-compete India and Korea, for example.]

If you have the time, please write a letter to Representatives Hunt, Brunner, Deadrick, Dykstra, Gillespie, Glenski, Haverly, Heineman, Howie, Hunhoff, Jensen, Jerke, Klaudt, Koistinen, Kraus, Krebs, Lange, McCoy, Michels, Miles, Nelson, Novstrup, Pederson (Gordon), Rausch, Rhoden, Tornow, Turbiville, Van Etten, Weems, Wick, and Willadsen and Senators Bartling, Abdallah, Earley, Kelly, Kloucek, Koskan, McNenny, Moore, Napoli, and Schoenbeck, who introduced the bill. South Dakota has set up a handy webpage with a form to email each of them directly!

And while you’re at it, send a few letters to your own representative asking them to consider the economic impact of the law. No one wants to spend more money.

I’m thinking of moving my blog to Wordpress.com because they use Wordpress software to manage their blogs. While there, I found Plasma Pong [click for a download] Atari Boy’s blog. It’s pretty fun, but I suggest you use an external mouse rather than the touchpad on your laptop. You’ll need Windows. [Sorry, my Apple-inclined friends.] The music is dramatic. Think that Guinness commercial staged on a train and set to the Carmina Burana-level dramatic.These screen shots are mine. Atari Boy has more here.

I apologize for the impersonal nature of this post. I tried to make up for it with lots and lots of links.

Reverend Doctor Stan Johnson was giving his sermon, the third of a series of six, on one of the four ends of the Presbyterian Church. This week he turned to truth, though he seemed to be talking an awful lot about the all-but-irreconcilable war between man and God. And just as he was about to get to the point, something happened. Ruth McColgan, a new grandmother for the third time, collapsed. I was immediately transported to Missouri, to my cousins’ church, one of those Methodist churches established in the revivalist spirit founded just before the Revolution and carried westward by Manifest Destiny. There it is not uncommon for a woman to faint and fit. There they have a volunteer staff of large, mostly bearded men charged to catch and cradle anyone who might run up to the altar proclaiming His return until, overcome by the Holy Spirit, she drops. This is only really dangerous if the local prophet hits a pew on the way down. Hence the large, mostly bearded men.

But we’re much quieter than that. Our church has a steeple, an organ and a grand piano, no electric guitar or overhead projector, and we only tithe once per service. Only the children are allowed to rush the altar, and then, only when called for “Our Moment with the Children.” So, Ruth gave the rest of the congregation something of a shock. And the accompanying seizures prompted three phone calls to 911 for ambulance service rather than alleluias and reputedly laudatory declarations in tongues.

His sermon interrupted by a grave medical emergency, the Reverend Doctor played it cool. Everyone did. Dr. Johnson called for prayer. Everyone lowered his head and took the hand of his neighbor. The organist provided soft, pastoral music to underscore Stan’s comforting words. The prayer continued until the paramedics arrived and ended shortly thereafter. Then the congregation joined their voices in an round of hymn 327: I Have a Friend in Jesus even though it was not announced in today’s bulletin. As soon as they carted Ruthie away, we did what we came to do: take communion. It was the first Sunday of the month, after all.

After church service ended, the lingering members applauded Allen’s postlude. He had chosen a piece by Franz Liszt, to whom Allen is directly related, in the music geneological sense. We joked about how much Ruth must not have liked what Stan was saying, how we were prepared, and about poor old Ben Wellington, who, a few years later, had finished a sermon during an ordination only to sit down in the choir loft, in the pew I normally call my own, and summarily died. This sort of thing happens about once a year. Jack Harris, who sits in the pew behind me, had had his heart attack there. But medicine is fairly miraculous. They put a stent in him and Jack was back at choir rehersal four days later.

I told my dad and sister about it at the Brockton Bickford’s afterward. Being on the Massachusetts’ South Shore, its sign boasts all-day breakfast, steak, lobster, clam, and beer and wine. What a mix. Then they took off to Sudbury to exchange a pair of my sister’s diamond earrings. She found a speck of carbon in one of them.

Someone about all this feels very New England to me. If there’s a problem crops up, fix it and get back to work. I can think of no better example of the Protestant work ethic. In fact, I’ve noticed a lot of typically New England things lately. I’ll give you only two, but I only expect you to read one. I’ll tell what they are so you can choose: self-service check-outs first, then Dairy Queen second. Both are short, and they’re related sequentially.

Last night, DJ came over because, and I can’t justify this, we have about two and one half dozen eggs and he wanted an omlette. The Grove store closes well before 6pm on Saturdays, so he was stuck to either do it himself or find someone else to do it for him and my will is fairly pliable. We met my sister at the Stoppy down the street. She and her friend April purchased ingredients for a home-cooked steak bomb, done properly with mushrooms, green peppers and onions. Somewhat coincidentally, we picked up a green pepper and yellow onion for the omlette, and told Janice to put hers back. As is, we still had too much pepper and onion. We also got maple syrup sausage links. I just ate the last seven as an after-dinner snack. Without the eggs, they’re a bit unsatisfying.

Not wanting to wait, no one inside of 495 does, we tried our hand at the self-service check-out. This thing is awful. Not only does it cheat real, living people out of jobs, it doesn’t work. We found the barcode for a yellow onion, placed it on the scale, and then moved it to the conveyor belt as directed. The belt ran backwards, causing the onion to hit some sensor bar, which signalled the computer to line-item void the onion, which we could have then easily taken, saving a full sixty-nine cents. We did not, however, steal the onion. Instead, we looked up the barcode in the produce catalogue one more time, weighed the beast, and dropped it on the belt. Having some practice, the belt figured out to run forward, the computer charged us the sixty-nine cents, and we proceeded with the easy stuff that scans without all that complicated searching and weighing.

DJ just visited Virginia, where, it seems, all the gas pumps are pay first and there are no self-service check-out lines at the supermarket. Here we’re on the honor system, and it must work. Otherwise, stores would have taken us off of it. I’m glad that corporate America trusts New Englanders not to steal onions.

After musing on this point exactly, we went to McDonald for, wait for it, a few double cheeseburgers and headed home. To the kitchen. To make the omlette. But, what would you know, Dairy Queen has opened for the summer. In fact, it’s been open since March first. We had snow March second. We drove right by, pulled into an empty parking lot, turned around, and went to Dairy Queen, debating Blizzard mix-ins along the way. The wind was bitter cold last night. And Dairy Queen, as you might know, is a shack with soft serve ice cream machines and freezers full popsicles inside and not much else. It takes two people to work the counter during the early season, three during the peak. While the girl behind the counter prepared DJ’s mudslide Blizzard thing, a couple got in line behind us. They were both bundled up, especially the girl. It was obvious that she was freezing and not especially happy about it. She haunched over to conserve heat. Her hands were placed firmly in her puffy jacket pockets. She scowled as she studied the menu. Despite the decidedly frigid weather, people formed a line outside the Dairy Queen at 7:30pm on a Saturday night in a small, suburban town. [Avon is only about one mile in diameter.] The man who owns the DQ, I am told, now lives handsomely year-round in his vacation home in Florida.

Last night on the way to Cambridge, I had a small panic attack whereby I form a plan of attack on the rest of my immediate life lest it overtake me and I black-out in public. [It has never come to that, but I'm sure that's what would happen.] In case you are wondering — if you’re not, you should stop reading now — I have organized my life into three hour days. Each day I must do the following:

Calculus of Variations. (1 hour) First I’ll work through Fomin’s translation of Gelfands lectures. They work out variational problems in flat space with a few examples from field theory, classical mechanics, and geometry. Mostly it’s a journey into analysis. Once I’m done with that, I’ll move on to Jost’s book and learn about minimal surfaces properly. If at some point I make it through Jost, I’ll hit up Morrey, but he’s a long ways off.

General Relativity. (1 hour) For this I’ve chosen an obscure but very good book by Barret O’Neill called Riemannian Geometry with Applications to General Relativity. The whole point of the book is to give a proof of the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems: given some very weak causality assumptions, there needs be a black hole or a big bang. Along the way he fleshes out symmetric spaces, Lie algebras, and other good and fundemental stuff. He also takes on variational problems, mostly that of geodesics. Hawking and Penrose all but force him to. It’ll be good to visit the calculus of variations from two very different points of view.

Cognitive Theory. (1 hour) Now this is less straight-forward. It’s very difficult to make a good curriculum if you don’t know the material already. Even still, my [general] plan is this: Piaget’s Psychology of Intelligence to learn about assimilation and adaptation. Then to learn why he’s wrong, I’ll read the boldly titled Getting it wrong from the beginning: Our progressivist inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget by Egan. It was written in 2003, so it must be righter than Piaget who wrote the Psychology back in 1950. Afterwards, it’s time for Vygotsky and situated learning in the Mind in Society and some other stuff about activity theory. There are a number of journal articles I’ll read, but I’m not sure which ones just yet. And there’s this book called Cognition in the Wild and I should reread stuff by Papert. Why can’t all disciplines write textbooks like math textbooks?

And math education! Gelfand wrote a number of books on algebra and trigonometry and arithmetic designed specifically elementary school students. I should check them out. I know next to nothing about elementary school math education. And then Paul Sally wrote those nice geometry books for little kid teachers, too. And if I’m not mistaken, Schmidt is big into math education, too. I wonder if he’d talk to me. And Judah Schwartz! and Andrea diSessa. There are a lot of people I should read.

Also, each day I must either do two hundred push-ups or go swimming. Last night I swam with Laura Chapman at Blodgett. It was the first time I’d been in the water since I had to cut off my jammers with a Swiss Army knife to avoid an extended, wet, and naked wriggle in the locker room. It was also the first time since I had thrown six-year old Robert on his head, landing myself on my knees. It took several days for them to bruise. That’s how you can tell it was really bad. Despite these physical and emotional trauma, I was able to pull along nicely. I cut my work-out in half, swimming only sets of 250 yards rather than the full 500. Laura tried to teach me the breast stroke, something I find rather unnatural. I kept defaulting to the dolphin kick, so eventually I just switched to butterfly. [Not for long, of course. I went 25 yards; she went 25 yards. Not to be outdone, I went another 25 yards. By this time we were sufficiently tired and left.]

Today has been a day of preparation. This weekend I decided over a plate of left-over Chinese that I would apply to the masters program in Creative and Critical Thinking at the Graduate College of Education of UMass/Boston. Having flirted with graduate school applications earlier this fall, I should have remembered clearly how frustrating personal statements can be. They are worse, much worse than cover letters. Cover letters are easy. The job description tells you what to write. They require this skill and experience in that, so you write that you know how to do this skill and have that experience. Nothing to it. The trick is finding the right job description. Personal statements work in precisely the opposite way. You supply the skills and experience and then hope that the application committee is looking for them.

So, in an attempt to get my thoughts together, I’ve reread the first seventy-four pages of Piaget’s Psychology of Intelligence. He’s just finished critiquing the Gestalt school and about to unveal his thoughts about assimilation and appropriation. These are good buzz words. Others are situated learning environments, proof theory, and schema. The trick is to figure out how to put them all into a coherent essay explaining my interests in pedagogic research. [As an aside: when I was working on a paper on archaelogical methods I came across the word pedology. It is simultaneously the study of soil and study of the physical and mental development of children. This is both funny and apt to my research proposal.] I don’t think I’d like to work on the role of technology in math education, but there’s a good chance of it. Even worse, I could end up working in complexity theory — at least then I’d be able to thwart proponents of intelligent design with their own rhetoric. [To be fair, complexity theory is a legitimate and arguably useful branch of scientific inquiry. It discusses things which are adaptive, self-organizing phenomena called learning systems. Here, learning is a technical term. The ID camp has stolen complexity theory and severely misused it in a popular context. Even chaotic systems like the weather and magnetic fields are not covered by complexity theory (as far as I understand it).] Decentralized systems are important and have been overlooked in science and social science curricula for a long time. There is a trend to introduce it into the school system through modelling the spontaneous genesis of traffic jams, the movement within colonies of ants and termites, or the behaviour of slime mold, for example. This so-called ecological solution to modelling can be very powerful, but to me, it is very boring. Danielle would make fun of me if I studied chaos theory [in the Jurassic Park-coffee house sense] and liken me to Kevin. I’m not sure I could live that down.

Enough of that for now. Anyone who wants to help me develop my personal statement, please help. It’d be entirely productive, I think, to talk this stuff over with a real, live human face-to-face. Be warned, I’d very likely bring a notebook to record your throughts so that I can later pass them off as my own. Be comfortable with that before you talk to me.

Separately from math, I’ve continued with Thucydides. Yes, Susannah, I’ve made it to the funeral oration. I stopped just before it started. I’m so excited I’m not sure how I’ll be able to sleep.

But should I even sleep? DJ is on his way now from Virginia. Minutes ago he hopped on the Jersey turnpike. I expect him here in about six hours. He’s promised, demanded that we play tennis after breakfast.

Before I go to bed, though, I should tell you about my latest drastic decision: I’m going to start dancing again. The American Masters: Gene Kelly on WGBH tonight has inspired me once again to sign up for a ballet class. Now this was something I had planned to do about a week ago [and also a semester ago] anyway. True, I’ve been threatening for months now. Unfortunately, I missed the registration at the Boston Ballet for this term. They don’t start a new session until September. By then my mania will have worn off and class will keep me busy enough, I hope. Still, I want to dance in that “distinctly American way” that he does. See, I’m mad at Gene Kelly. All the scholars tout him for democratizing dance. He moves like a sailor would, like a construction worker would; when he jumps through puddles you feel like you could do it, too. But you can’t — I can’t. He’s a highly trained, skilled, technical dancer. It upsets me that he makes it look so effortless, so fun. Because of the show, I did five sets of forty push-ups with my arms at varying lengths and several minutes worth of stretches. Tomorrow I plan to swim after lecture. Maybe the OFA offers summer courses. Curse that Kelly!