Teaching Morality/Ethics

I think one of the most important things in teaching behavior to kids is that a double standard is impossible to uphold. If an adult can and a kid can't, there'd better be a damn good reason why not.

One of my very earliest memories is that same double standard in practice by parents. They wouldn't allow me to walk up on the second floor when it was first being built; they said I was too heavy and I'd fall through. I'd grasped enough of logic by that time to see through them: they were heavier than I was, and they weren't falling through. Life wasn't fair.

When I recounted this two-year-old memory to Mama, she explained that, at the time, the boards weren't nailed down, and they knew where the beams were, and were walking on the beams under the boards; I wouldn't have known. If they'd stepped in the wrong places, they too would have fallen through.

That made a lot more sense to me.

Flowers for Algernon

Figured out what's wrong with my laptop's mini-mouse. The diagonal roller is not working, inside. This leads to fear, hate, and suffering, as the mouse only responds to up and down. When there's something that up and down don't quite catch, but diagonal would, it doesn't.

At least I know what's wrong now.

Wonderful Spam

Just got a spam requesting that I attend DeVry. Hm.

Interesting thought. Maybe I'll consider it after I graduate.

Rebooting

Evidently at some time in my past, I devoured something resembling the Alfred Bester compilation Virtual Unrealities. I remember a few of them. I seem to remember some of them where I might not have been reading them, in the cafeteria at Ryan. But I might have read them then. I know I read Bester when Shawn recommended to me Babylon 5.

Bester of B5 is the evil psychic played by Walter Koenig. I fell immediately in happy love/hate with the character, and when I happened to see something by someone of the same name at the library, I picked it up and read it most happily. The character was named in honor of the author, it seems.

Something about those stories pings something in me. Perhaps it did when I first read them; perhaps the ideas were implanted in me when I read the stories first. I'm wondering if I didn't run into the stories earlier, when I first discovered science fiction, in some compilation endorsed by Asimov. I think that may have been where I ran into "Fondly Farenheit"...

creationism

My view of the human condition is not of the baby as tabula rasa but repository of seeds. There are seeds of good, and of evil; of generosity, of kindness, of selfishness, of selflessness, of every possible human trait. It's the responsibility of the raiser, and later, the person grown, to tend the garden, to cherish the plants and make sure it doesn't get grown over with love-lies-itching, or even blackberries; either would be a flaw, one more immediately apparent than the other, but both as deadly.

Literary

My book of the day when I went to the library was Tanya Huff's Sing the Four Quarters; after that, the Bester; now, Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night. Just to keep track of my literary intake.

Family

Adam's gotten into the habit of saying "Bad fayoumis!" now, and so has Nephew. Interesting and somewhat amusing, from my perspective. It used to only be a family phrase.

Light and sleep

Two of the strings of lights illuminating my room had burned out. I replaced them with a string of blue lights. I moved the futon from the floor onto the mattress-on-springbox at the other side of the room. Finally, floor space! I rejoice.

My room's feeling more mine again. More like a place to live rather than a place to just sleep and sit at the computer.

on silly wordplay

Once, I was able to make excuses for my mother thus:

"She's putting round holes in square pegs."(   )

Owwww.

Decided it was high time that Votania got that seven-pointed star in blue lights on the ceiling of her temple. Began scientifically, with the number of remaining boxes of lights, the length of effective lighting, and C = 2pi R. Did not count on thumb blisters. The circle is measured and up; the places where the points will be are marked with clothespins, and one of the seven legs is up, getting into the second string of lights. It's a little smaller than it absolutely could have been, but given the space we had to work with, the size makes sense.

Ow, my poor thumb.

(no subject)

I hate heights.