for your eyes only!
In the halls of the local PetCo, a new and highly unusual breed of conure was spotted — the Gweep! Any further sightings of the Gweep Conure (gweepus conurus) should be reported to your local animal officials immediately. Please note the time, date and place of the sighting so that we can determine the Gweep’s natural patterns and habitat. Thank you.
Facing finals, I did what every student does at some point: cleaned my room! The floor shine is due to a patented combination of Swiffer Wetjet and elbow grease. I am quite pleased with how it has turned out. Now back to our regularly scheduled program…..
It just struck me that my brain has a unique method of accessing words. I realized this while working on the answer to a question for my professional responsibility course. I had finished writing the first part of the answer… the next half second seemed to go by in slow motion:
1) The question was whether a legal employer could place restrictions upon an attorney’s right to practice even after he has left the firm, including a prohibition on working with any of the clients he had worked for at the firm. After answering in the negative (mostly), I realized I could add a second part to my answer;
2) Conceptually, I knew that I wanted to talk about how if a firm did impose those restrictions, it might not only infringe on the rights of the attorney but also of the clients, if they want to stay with the attorney in question;
3) I knew there was a word I wanted to use to describe this concept, and I knew I KNEW the word, but it wasn’t at the front of my brain;
4) As I started writing the answer, I noted to myself that the word I wanted to use would come at the very end of the sentence;
5) I put in a “request” for the word… that is, I sent my brain scurrying around for the proper word, stored in one of my memory engrams somewhere in the cavern of my head;
6) By the time my pen had gotten to the end of the sentence, the word was there. I ended the sentence with the phrase “client autonomy.”
The above six steps took place in less than half a second. I was not consciously aware of each step as it occurred. Only after writing the sentence did I realize that I didn’t know the word I was going to use to describe my thoughts until I actually used the word — and then I backtracked and realized How the Word Came to Be.
And it’s fascinating to me, because I’d guess that this is how my brain ALWAYS works. Ideas and concepts and thoughts are in the cavern, rattling around, and some part of my brain is constantly sending out acquisition requests, and when my support staff is actually paying attention, BOOM! I am the pinnacle of linguistic efficiency. 
[Note: The exact same thought process just occurred for all the big words in my last sentence ("pinnacle," "linguistic" and "efficiency"). I call them big words because they require more brainpower to retrieve than, well, most of the everyday words.]
Now, if only my brain could spit out a few good parrot names! Will I be settling on Rudy? Go wild with Ruby? Get all hippy with Chroma? Or will I go with something entirely different, like Menorah or Jack-o-Lantern (“Jack” for short) or, as some have suggested, Goldblatt?
Ooooohhh….. SCALIA! He will wittily dissent from every suggestion I give him. Hi Antonin! How ya doin’, ‘Tony? Yes you are… yes you are… who’s my Scalia!
Today I visited my little bird and tested out names to see what got the best reaction. Take a look.
12:30 PM
Liz: chloe is okay
Liz: kind of dramatic and affected
Liz: how about zoey?
Liz:
Liz: zoe*?
Liz: or Joey
Liz: or CHARLIE
Liz: !!!!
Liz:
Matthew: NO CHARLIE
Liz: lol why not?
Liz: he looks like a charlie!!!!
Liz: little Charlie Maize
Liz: or how about
12:35 PM
Liz: Maize Charlie
Liz: OR
Liz: oh look at this:
Liz: Charlie Chloe = CC or Chloe Charlie = CC
Liz: his name will be CC!!!!
Liz: “hello, my name is CC”
Liz: lol
Liz: OH
Liz: how about PEEKABO
Liz: PEEKABOO*
Liz: like peekaboo street
Liz: or whatever that skiier ladys name is
Liz: lady’s*
Liz: and it will be a tribute to winston, u know?
Liz: how about
Liz: Snuffles
Liz: or Mr. Snuffles
Liz: or Ruffles
Liz: or Foo Foo
Liz: or Mo
Liz: i like mo
Liz: fluffy?
Liz: elmo!
Liz: gizmo!
Liz: BILL
Liz: JACK
Liz: no, not jack.
Liz: Shizzle
Liz: C-Dawg
Liz: LIGHTNING
Liz: thunderbolt!
Liz: Heaven
Liz: Skyy
Liz: Hell? lol
Liz: oooo
Liz: Fire
Liz: Flame
Liz: Sting
Liz: Spike
Liz: Harmony
Liz: harmony is cute.
Liz: i had a tennis coach at cranbrook swimmed club named harmony once.
Liz: Jetson
Liz: George jetson
Liz: Ralph
Liz: William
Liz: you were gonna be a william weren’t you????
Liz: Moses
Liz: i like moses
Liz: Abraham
Liz: Al
Liz: David
Liz: God
Liz: lol no
Liz: we can’t name him god
Liz: Ian
Liz: like your friend!
12:40 PM
Liz has gone offline.
Children are wonderfully creative beings with boundless energy. They draw and sing and create and smile and, yes, play video games. These are all healthy activities for a child… up to a point. When a child spends all day playing video games — for three years — or is creative all day without guidance from adults about how to use that creativity to learn new things, that’s unhealthy. It’s not school; it’s just a bunch of kids hanging out all day. It’s also what the Fairhaven School in Maryland encourages, and for which students are charged over $6,000 per annum in tuition.
Last I heard, “tuition” meant money paid for instruction. Yet, from reading today’s article in the Washington Post, I am hard-pressed to see how the word tuition applies. Maybe it’s more accurately described as an “activity fee.” Maybe “membership dues.” But tuition? That implies education, which the children at Fairhaven are simply not getting.
Purely alternative schools, where “teaching” is frowned upon and “students” (I use all these words very loosely) are left to frolic as they see fit, have no place in our educational system. They create oxymoronic students who don’t study, teachers who don’t teach, and schools where learning is left up to the whims of the children. Don’t want to learn about fractions today, Timmy? That’s okay — go climb trees instead. Write a skit. Bake a cake. It’s all learning here!
The very idea is almost too ludicrous to be real, but indeed it is, and some parents actually pay money for this tripe, and I want to know how effective Fairhaven really is. Unfortunately, the Washington Post article didn’t tell me. It made some lame-o excuse about there being “little way to evaluate Fairhaven except on its own terms,” and then noted anecdotally that a few of its “graduates” have actually gone off to college. That’s great, but the article stopped there. Were the three graduates actually prepared for college? Did they learn anything useful in elementary through high school? How many students don’t graduate, anyway? What happens to them? Do you have any tables or charts we could look at? We’ll never know because intrepid WaPo staff reporter Nick Anderson didn’t dig. “That wasn’t my angle,” he may say, cocking his Scoop hat snippily. Fine. Angle. I get it. The fact remains — you don’t know how many Fairhaven students are truly well-equipped to handle life outside the Fantasy Forest.
It’s understandable that Fairhaven couldn’t provide any data on its students — after all, the very idea of “data” implies some kind of standardized collection method, and possibly the use of a spreadsheet. It probably is just a bit inconsiderate of us to expect the Fairhaven folks to acquiesce to society’s request for meaningful numbers demonstrating any sort of progress. Besides, the Fairhaven people may not know how to work a spreadsheet.
But if I were the Post, I would have gone past the Fairhaven folks. I would have talked to state officials, school boards around the area, university admissions counselors, to discover exactly why, as the article notes, “[s]tudents at Fairhaven earn no course credits toward a state-recognized high school diploma.” Why not having a diploma might put a damper on one’s professional aspirations. Why it is important to expect from our children something more than constant playtime on their own terms. Why teachers have a responsibility to take the video games and skateboards away and force Timmy to buckle down and learn how to write properly, how to critically analyze a text, how to become a productive member of society, and how to try to muffle the sounds of laughter echoing toward us from across the Pacific.
Fairhaven is a candy store and our children’s brains are rotting away. We owe our children more than that.
The quest for a decent bird name continues. The sun conure in question is playful, loving, a blazing yellow-orange, and loves to roll around, lay in the palm of my hand, and nuzzle up in the space between my bicep and chest. Today I considered various musical names:
• Cadence
• Chroma (from Chromatic Scales)
• Brio (from the Italian con brio, meaning with spirit!
• Salsa
• Tempo
• Trill
• Tutti
Of these, I am leaning toward Chroma because it’s also an obvious reference to his bright colors. Gweepay, Sweetie and I also ran through the seven dwarves and the seven deadly sins for names, but nothing really grabbed us. (Sneezy? Wrath?)
—
UPDATE: We’ve narrowed it down to Rudy and Blaze. Rudy’s in the lead because Blaze is a wee bit too “in your face” for my tastes.
I have gone to the PetCo down the street about 20 times since the beginning of the year, mostly to hang out with my boy Ron, whose name will have to be changed, because “Ron” is no name for a bird. This is the epitome of a sun conure, definitely living up to the reputation these birds have as little clowns. I’ve never met a bird that was so playful, loved to roll around so much, or preferred to sit cuddled up next to my chest as opposed to on my shoulder, where birds usually like to perch.
If I get the bird — big If, but chances improving every day — we can have a naming contest! Back in 2000 when I bought a green Quaker Parrot, the list was as follows:
1. Winston
2. Reagan
3. Moses
4. Jesus
5. Regis
6. Margaret Hatcher
We went with Winston, after Winston Churchill, because it’s a dignified name and we hoped naming the bird that would instill some class into its personality. I ruled out Reagan because I think it’s more of a dog name; Moses is a little too weighty for a bird’s name; Jesus would just be weird — I mean the bird’s not Hispanic or anything; Regis was a fad name; and Margaret Hatcher (ha!) was too cumbersome.
Now I’m thinking of names with “ee” at the end of them. Such as:
1. Rudy
2. Petey
3. Kiwi
4. Aristocracy
No, probably not the last one. Actually, none of those names really strike my fancy. Any suggestions? Take a look at the video — 4 minutes of cooing, rolling around, and generally being best buds — and let me know in the comments.
Can our hero, Matt, finally do a real life honest-to-goodness pull-up after years and years of failure and disappointment? Prepare to be shocked….. AND AWED!
Matt’s pull-up attempt comes on the heels of his last strength related record: 10 dips on his kitchen counter. Take the kids out of the room — this one’s shirtless.
|
