Hotel breakfast

I am a huge fan of hotel breakfast buffet. Today I had one in manhattan after a great night catching up with some former students over dinner. Maybe drank a little too much because I’m dehydrated this morning. 

Book shopping is next before heading back out east. Meanwhile, just look at those eggs. 

Having a Beer

It is incredible how a smell or a taste can really bring you back. This was the beer that my good friend, the Poet David and I drank when we could in college. It seemed like it was reserved for special times. Maybe not too special, but it wasn’t cheap so we didn’t have it all the time.

I saw it at Stop and Shop last week when I dropped in to pick up some necessities and here it was - an unplanned necessity. I think it was maybe $9 for six of them; now it’s closer to $14. 

After having a couple at the computer I was brought back to times in undergraduate where we talked about great books, great reading, and the art of writing. Ironically, these were all things that I imagined I would be able to do more and more freely as a professor. 

It was a nice nostalgic moment for me to go back to when reading and writing had little institutional purpose and felt a lot closer and meaningful and part of the world. I think that writing and reading were more open-ended at that time in my life and free of institutional purpose. 

There was institutional writing to be sure, many assignments called for it, but it wasn’t the entirety of reading and writing. It was just a slight amount. It really had little to no relationship with the reading and writing I was doing outside of the institution.

But the institution made it possible to do this reading and writing. Visiting the physical library was much more vital in those days but the institutional access to the library is still incredibly vital.

Where did that relationship to writing and reading go? Have I let my institutional association take even that from me through my frustration and disappointment with them? 

Or should I have these beers more often?

Snow Day

Spent a lot of today cleaning up after the winter storm last night.

I am reminded that Buddhist thought considers this kind of work - cleaning up - as a valuable privilege. 

It’s a good opportunity not to just lose yourself in the work or whatever might be the standard Zen idea of it, but it allows the mind to race through thoughts, feelings, and ideas without dwelling on any too long or too little. They simply come and go.

This is how it works for me anyway, not sure if I am doing it right. It might be something antithetical to the practice to think of a right or wrong way. To hover over this conception is perhaps the most antithetical. 

But wondering about the borders and boundaries isn’t bad it’s hanging on to them. So I’m grateful to spend a few hours removing the snow which over time would have removed itself. It’s too funny. 



 

Listening, Ethics, and Class Videos

Hey everyone, just a rambling general update today.

https://www.last.fm/user/Professor_Steve/listening-report/year/2025/week/2

Seems that the second week of the year saw me falling off in my listening habits, but still pretty good. I'm recovering from a cold this week so not a lot going on. 

I am thinking of recycling a lot of my YouTube videos for class this semester as I do have a lot of good ones about debate and argumentation. Is it ethical to make students watch YouTube? There are advertisements there. Is it ethical to make students watch ads for a course they are paying thousands of dollars to attend? 

I would think at best we'd have a good video platform at the university level like Vimeo or something that all students could use. I guess we have Panopto, but most students use the Canvas Studio or they just upload the file to Canvas.

Maybe I'm over thinking it. 


A Week Away

https://open.spotify.com/track/3LfZkFQpwt9q2xfXIw2FHC?si=d7ce48ef8ddf4336

We are a week away from classes starting and I'm about a week way from being fully ready. So that's really something.

I'm going to try very, very hard not to care too much about what goes on in there. Offering the best possible class I can and then evaluating evidence presented by students that they are understanding (i.e. forging a relationship with the material) is about all that can be done. 

I'm really wondering if I'm actually going to get away with this 2 sections at the same time = 2 sections for your contract obligation. I really hope so and I certainly expect it to fail but I think I can whip up a mighty fine public speaking course fairly quickly.

It really has to be a spring focused on pumping out some of these drafts. The backlog is too big. The opportunities are there. It just requires a bit less social media and YouTube time. That's really it. Not too much. 

I've been going to the gym; hired a trainer. She told me the smallest caloric deficit with regular short sets of exercise is all you need for massive transformation. Same can be said with writing except the deficit is in other activities you do during the day and short sets refers to typing away (or scribbling with that favorite pen). 


Strange Dream Fragments


I had a dream involving a creature that looked like this but I haven't run across this creature ever in my life, not even on social media or internet reading. It's called the Antarctic Scale Worm, and it's apparently a deep water predator. 

In my dream, people were wearing this as a living stole, something like a living fashion accessory-pet. I don't remember much else about the dream except it involved a grey-green futuristic research facility that was in the woods somewhere. It was very dark. 

I should try to write down dream impressions when I wake up and see if they lead me anywhere, because this was totally too strange to find this in my feed today.

Scenes from the Gym Today


SCENE 1

Old Man sitting on a weight machine using an old iPhone. He is listening to the handset staring into space.

OLD MAN: Ok well I have to go but if you keep this up you're going to end up in jail just like your mother. Bye!


SCENE 2 - young man and woman walking down the stairs after finishing their workouts

YOUNG MAN: I just don't think that's how you are supposed to run a business.

YOUNG WOMAN: And he has this Polish Flag hanging up in there, like, how is that going to help?

YOUNG MAN: *shaking head*


SCENE 3 - an old man MIKE is vigorously using a rowing machine way too fast. A second old man FRANK enters and walks by him.

MIKE: (shouting): Hey Frank!

FRANK: (stops) Mike, how ya doing?

MIKE: I have some bad news for you Frank

FRANK: (beat)

MIKE: I'm not moving to Massachusetts!

Both begin to laugh the old man muppet laugh and become louder and more animated so much so that a woman who was slowly rowing next to them stops and joins in on the laughter, looking around the gym as she does so.


THE END




It arrives

In preparation for attending the Met Opera’s premiere of Moby-Dick, I bought the most praised edition of the book out there for us to read. It’s already blowing my mind with the annotations. 

I wonder if I will ever be able to teach this book in some way one day? Most likely never. But it remains a very exciting and interesting book to me. The challenge, as ever, is rhetorical. Should this book be interesting to others, and if so why? And if so, how? 


Mysterious Giovanni

Who is Giovanni? 

I was given a CD collection today and there are some amazing things in it but none more amazing than this collection of Giovanni CDs. 

Look at him. Can you have a more disinterested look? He looks like his parents are forcing him to take a photo. 

This collection must be the largest Giovanni album collection in the US right now. These are just a few of them. Why so many?

I also inherited a Bose radio CD player so what better way to test it than a Giovanni CD? There was already one in there when I opened it. It’s just piano music no vocals, which was disappointing. 

Then I started thinking about this from a Stephen King perspective. What if Giovanni is an ancient spirit and playing his whole album allows him to escape his CD prison (like the prison in Superman 2) and then he takes over my body and plays average piano with it? 

That wouldn’t be terrible now that I read it. Maybe even an improvement. But who is he?

Does anyone know or has anyone been to a Giovanni concert?