Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Cartesian Product

This post was supposed to be good. I jokingly said my 100th post would be good and that tripped me up a little this week. I wanted to write something important, with sentence structure and everything. But now I figure I'd better just show up.

A while back, like two years ago, not handling transition well, I remembered a book I read in high school about a guy who threw away every idea he had so he could rethink and reorganize his beliefs. I found Discourse on the Method and started reading it again. I saw the first thing he put back was God. That helped me the most. Then after four pages of "if I smoosh it flat is it still a ball of wax?", and putting aside any nominalist vs. realist debate, I just wanted to scream in the book's ear "Dude, it's wax!". And then the book fell apart in my hands.

But it's been helpful to turn things over and look at them, to notice the silly things I believed when I was six. To put things out there and question them. To say to myself, what kind of mom are you if your kids are so lacking for attention they sneak up and pull your grey hairs out? {FLIP} Are you kidding me? My kids are so loved. {FLIP} Well, you could do a better job with their haircuts. {FLIP} Okay.

Sometimes all you have to do is write something down to see if it works. T or F, Sweetheart of America = Anchorman Gravitas.

I realize I don't believe that people are fungible, interchangeable like mushrooms. I think we all have special skills that should be prized and that what we have in common is our kindness, loyalty and willingness to show up.

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Mashup I am not going to make (contributed by Z): "Horse Racing Song" (William Tell Overture) and "Take A Chance On Me"

2 comments:

sgreerpitt said...

Wow, 100! I've got a long way to go to reach that milestone.

Teaching the students I teach, I forget that there are people out there in the world (as opposed only to in books) who actually use words like "Cartesian." Way to go.

Qaro said...

Thanks! Cartesian Product is multiplying everything by everything, so it makes a nice pun, the result of everything. It comes up in databases as a mistake. You forget to join two tables together and it shows one record for each record in both tables. And suddenly the U.S. has 100 states. : )