Life Navigation

I work with college students. I hope they come to me with a desire to learn and some kind of work ethic that Is reflective of their purpose for being in college.

I hope that they understand that my role is mainly that of facilitator. I am not their disciplinarian or their monitor. Many of the course requirements are not monitored by me, but they are requirements to get the most from the class and make the most progress.

I do not think they realize that they have their own time. Maybe they are so used to having their time managed by people in authority that they use their time to do the things they have to do. They maybe don't understand that they should always use their time doing what they want to do.

Wants are a big thing to understand and maybe that develops over time. There are long range wants which are really the guiding principles one uses to navigate life, which are learned and developed through trial and error. This is maybe part of what college is about, a sandbox for life navigation.

Finisher

I am a finisher. I start things, in my own good time, and finish them when I am able. I start things solely to have the experience of completing them. This is different, I think, than to start things in order to finish them quicker or better than others. I think it is fine to do things quicker or better than others, if that's what you're into, I guess. It's not for me though. I think I am not alone and there's a lot of us out there, people who do not find satisfaction or validation in comparing themselves with others. Of course for us, the fact that there are others like us is not relevant really, as we do not need external validation, but maybe you competitors out there who don't understand us will feel better.
I think it's hard for people to understand, if they are the competitive sort, what the point of doing difficult things just to do them would be. I also think that a lot of the competitors were just told that the way to evaluate themselves is to measure against others, and that they might actually really dig doing things for the experience of doing them.
I like to set goals that blow my mind a little bit, to do things I never believed I could do. Thanks to the plethora of voices, whispering, shouting, and some just passing notes or giving dirty looks, I entered adulthood with a rather narrow idea of what my options were in life and what I could accomplish. I wasn't raised to beat the standard, but to meet it, and it turns out that the standards set had very little to do with who I was and what my possibilities were or are.
I did not give up on my doctorate because there was so much telling me that it was beyond my reach. I didn't have to be the one with the most publications or job offers at graduation, I just had to graduate. It was so super hard, but I persisted. That mattered more than anything.
Recently I ran an 8 mile race up Lewiston Hill, which is Lewiston Mountain if you are running up it. I did it because I live in Lewiston and I see that Hill all the time, like most of the time my eyes are open. It is inconceivable that anyone would run up it. I knew if I did, the Hill would be a source of inspiration to me on my bad days, and a source of affirmation on my good ones. My race was to finish, which I did. It sucked. I will never do it again.
What would have really sucked would have been to have given up and to have never done it.

Poor Portia does not seem to care a bit.

My bunny Portia had a still born baby bunny today. I think it's so sad, but Portia seems fine. I feel sad like when a person looses a baby, but I don't connect to Portia like a person. I feel that she is a rabbit.
She is a small brown bunny, shy and skittish, a 4-H reject. According to the person I got her from, the bunnies of a single color are not a very popular 4-H choice and most pick the multi colored ones. I do not see Portia as a single color, she is brown with lovely darker brown lowlights and a lighter brown undercoat. She's a tiny lop, but sometimes she holds her ears out sideways and she looks like an airplane.
So she does not seem to care one tiny bit about the lost baby, she is very excited about the ears of fresh corn I put next to her food bowl. She doesn't seem to know that she could have had a little baby friend, and I guess that's better. I would hate to think that she is missing a baby that never really was, and longing after possibilities and hopes. I wouldn't know how to console her, as I do not speak rabbit.
People feel sad when they loose babies, they miss their babies, even if the babies grow up, they sometimes have to mourn what they hoped that the babies could have been. Sometimes the babies turn out very badly, and they just have to be accepted for what they are. Not all people are fountains of joy. Some are duds. Sometimes the babies are a dream come true and a total delight, and even those babies might get lost. You just never know what's going to happen.
Good thing for Portia, she really doesn't care.

Crab and Chocolate.

A chronicle of events is the shallow thinkers response. A reflection, a snapshot with words, the finding of significance in the mundane, well that is perhaps the hallmark of the (somewhat) motivated individual.
 I currently feel hungry. This is a universal experience that everyone can connect to. Might hunger be a metaphor for something else? Might it be symbolic of my lack of connectedness to the universal experience of my fellow humans?
Might it be the result of the four hours that have transpired since lunchtime?

There are so many things in life that are pleasant. Hunger is not one of them. I find it intolerable. As entertaining as the grumblings of my stomach are, and they are pretty durn funny, they don't make up for the overall unpleasantness. I get all drooly, I can't concentrate, and I find no nobility in the notion of depriving myself of food.  So I feel that when one is hungry one should eat, unless it is too close to dinner time and eating would diminish the full impact of the pending culinary experience. This of course only applies when someone has actually taken the time to prepare an actual meal, meant to be enjoyed. If you have nothing but crap food in your immediate future, feel free to snack at will.

I think it's amazing that I have so many choices of what to eat. It's quite luxurious. Two fourth of Julys ago I made barbeque and I purchased a fifteen-pound shoulder roast of pig. I just loved it so much, looking at that roast in my fridge, just loving the obscene good fortune of all that pork. This morning I had scrambled eggs, which were like little puffs of ovo cloud, and a quarter of a pound of bacon for breakfast. Not only was it delicious, I reveled in the perfect balance of wholesomeness and depravity as I reflected on the ironic nature of the meal itself. The continual renewal of life juxtaposed with preservation after death which together most likely sustained me as it clogged and hardened my arteries. What a delight to have such thoughts, to experience each morsel as a culmination of flavor and future, things forgotten, remembered, and foreboding.

Later, my husband read me something from the paper about people purchasing crab legs and candy bars with their SNAP benefits. Apparently this is a Big Deal to some people, evidence of the rampant abuse of public assistance that breeds laziness and favors entitlement over hard work. Oh fuck that, say I. If you are in a place where you would begrudge someone some delicious buttery crab and a Snickers, you have your own things to re assess. I say seafood and chocolate for all of humanity, regardless of ability to pay. I look forward to seeing the butter drip down the chins of humankind.