Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

Productivity We all have visions of how productive we could be if things were different. My list includes: Reorganize the basement Ride my bike every day Go for a walk every day Start writing fiction again Make a solo album Make collaborative music videos Revise poems into a collection Power wash the side of the house Get the driveway redone Tear down and make a new shed Finish raking the yard Redo the trail down to the river Make a fire in the fire pit, either fire pit... Learn a new song, or take a song and make it better Respond to the 10 influential album thing on Facebook I was nominated to do by Laura, Daniel, and Claiborne Read some of the books on my to-read pile Cook something delicious Clearly, this is not a prioritized list. I suppose I could start to organize it from easy to hard, and that would help a little. But the reality is that the pandemic has impacted us all differently depending on whether one has little children, sick relatives or family...

Delicious Hot Days It is interesting to have completed my meditations on the 7 Deadly Sins, and yet I feel like I didn't really address them, at least not as deadly sins. Of course, there have been plenty of moments that have conspired against me in ways that I will probably shy away from in such a public forum, at least for now. I wonder if that makes me a dishonest writer, too scared or embarrassed, or not mature enough yet to examine some of those other things outside of fiction or poetry. Night grilling. It is easier to exist behind veils. When I was teaching, I often talked about my costume and teaching persona. I wore a tie because it helped me remember my role, that despite my friendliness with my students, the simpatico of a younger (at the time) faculty member, I still would remember there was a separation in our roles and my responsibility as a teacher. Similarly, I took on a gregarious extrovert persona at the front of the classroom that relished the exuberant en...

Sloth Ten toed.  It is late, so I've given myself a time limit. So this will be an industrious meditation on sloth, which appears to be the last of my 7 Deadly Sins. There is the immediate connotation of sloth, which in my mind is equated with laziness, indolence, and waste... but then there is also image of a slightly sleepy looking animal, who moves slowly, but with purpose.  I need Amanda's help to ID this one. As a child I was always a slightly late bloomer. My mom often wondered if I should have started school a year later. Being a September baby, I was always one of the youngest people in my grade and it seemed like I always seemed to hit my stride as a student a year after my peers. It took a while for me to build up momentum, but it didn't mean I wasn't trying. Even later in life, when I was working on my doctorate, I remember telling my boss, David, that even though I was hitting a rough spot (my advisor, Julie, had passed away and I was flounderin...

Greed (A continued mediation on the 7 Deadly Sins) How does one differentiate greed from gluttony? Greed seems distasteful. But greed is tied to desire. Desire seems like a force of passion, even if it may result in greed or gluttony. I remember in middle school, in-between school assemblies about MX missiles, school dances, and someone's dad parking a DeLorean car outside for all the kids to gawk over, we had economic reality checks given by our teachers warning us that we were the first generation where it was projected that we would not earn more than the previous generation, and in all likelihood we would not experience the same standard of living we were experiencing as children. I'm not really sure what kind of inspiration we were supposed to draw from that information when puberty and Michael Jackson was breaking over all of us. But, for all these years, that, along with a 30-45 second wait for vaporization if Boston was hit by a nuclear warhead, has been reta...