So, okay, it’s Thursday, which is my worst day of the week in terms of having my act together.  I have a late night on Wednesday–I’m teaching an adult night class–and an early morning today, and I tend to be walking into walls. Today, I’m even more messed up than usual, because when I got…

So, today– I had a student who didn’t know that pig Latin was different than actual Latin. I’m not really writing a post here.  I’m just sort of completely floored. Not that it was the only wrong note in the bunch today, because there were a lot.  But you see what I’m up against. I…

I have odd relationships to words–to some words–sometimes for reasons I understand, and othertimes for reasons I don’t. Among the terms that bug me for reasons I understand are “brainstorming” and “joystick.”  I understand those because they’re a function of the fact that I’m old, and while the definitions of those terms have changed, their…

It’s Sunday, and on Sunday I have an invariable routine.  Well, almost invariable.  As long as there aren’t any plumbing problems, or funerals, or that kind of thing. What  I do on Sunday after I work and write this blog (sometimes), is make a lot of Stash  Double  Bergamot Earl Grey tea, put “early music”…

Okay–some breaking news.   Or something. Last night,  one of my sons took me to see a comedian named Ron  White, live in concert (a theater, not a club) in a small city near our house. Actually, the history of this is a lot more complicated than  I’m making this sound.  One of my sons bought…

So yesterday was crazy, but let me see if I can straighten any of this out. I don’t know enough about what was going on inside this woman’s head to say for sure, but my guess is that all this began with simple confusion.  She was an elderly woman, in spite of the hair dye…

So, here it is–one of those things that just sort of happens when you’re on the subject.  If you know what I mean.  This morning I was at the office of the place where I sometimes rent a car–long story; if you think I’m cheap about clothes, you should see me about cars–and while I…

I’m with Cheryl–I think Lymaree is vastly underestimated the extent to which we are judged by our appearances, even in California.  I wouldn’t expect to have any trouble in a store–well, not in the vast majority of stores–because the only issue there is ability to pay, and they don’t really care about anything else. In…

Okay, just for the sake of argument–let’s say that fiction is for what I say it is for, for people, not for plot. I bring this up because I am in the middle of reading Trollope’s The Duke’s Children, the last in his series of Palliser novels, centered around Parliament. For those of you who…

I’ve been thinking all night about Robert’s comment that he doesn’t quite accept the idea that teachers are going against the entire policy of “boost self esteem”  in order to make their kids feel like failures, and it occurs to me that a) the two things aren’t incompatible and b) that the self esteem project…