Anne Herbert, in The Whole Earth Catalog, told us that we should practice random acts of kindness aned senselss acts of beauty. She also pointed out the Ben Franklin-esque wisdom that I have just copied off my quotations page and a poster I brought him from the library and framed, and put in the top of the page in my diary template:Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.
It's my mantra, that and the rock-in-the-rain thing. These are much better mantras than "More wheat thins, please!"
I have been liberated from the math lab, and will be nestling into a corner of the regular computer lab, the room where the SCM is going. I don't know where in that room I can fit, exactly, but it's where I'm going. In about a month, according to the plan. I talked to another moving and storage guy today who's making a bid on the project, and I hope he gets it. He knew all the right answers to the library questions.
We're having state testing this week, the test that drives everything the school does, the test that is more important than any other aspect of public education. Each state has one, of course, thanks to No Child Left Behind (that's Bush's educational imperative for the non-U.S. among us); New Jersey's is called the High School Proficiency Assesment. It used to be called the High School Proficiency Test, but test is a bad word these days, and has been replaced in educational jargonese by "assesment." Because although it doesn't mean anything different, it sounds less harsh and mean, at least to the morons in charge of such things. All other life stops while the HSPA is being administered, and the school is locked up tighter than a maximum security prison. Two more days of it, and then next week they are sucking up the library, possibly, to give make-ups for the little dears who dared to be absent this week. Or so they claim. We shall see on that score as well, when the time comes.
On another subject entirely, I would like to know just how it is that the TV networks have the chutzpah to call a "series" a series. It's not as if they are showing episodes in order, even when the series is sequential in its plotlines, or bother to show a new episode every week. And they wonder why viewership is falling off. It's because even good series like Lost or Gilmore Girls are just insulting their viewers by showing random old episodes instead of new ones. They think they'll hide this tactic by beginning each episode with an extensive "Previously on ..." series of clips, so you'll feel like you know what's going on. Hey, I have been watching TV pretty much as long as there's been TV, and this just isn't nice. I finally stopped watching Monk because I could never figure out when it was on and when they had randomly started a new season. I don't want to stop watching other shows that I like. It's pissing me off.
K is coming in tomorrow evening, and I'm waiting now for her usual Wednesday phone call, which is a little late, I guess. I think she told me she would be home later today. But it's 6:30, so that makes it time to call my sister before my window closes. By ten of seven, any attention span she had for me is gone, so I'd better hurry.
