To finish the sentence once I’ve started it and have lost interest because it’s already written in my head

See, even to keep myself on a topic, to finish the sentence once I’ve started it and have lost interest because it’s already written in my head, it’s already constructed, hand just has to follow through but brain and inner voice want to move on—

Writing’s maybe more difficult than I think. To make a piece of prose follow conventions, we have to go against, well, limit and guide our brains (and I started to think this writing is too dull, too straightforward, then I said it’s OK, don’t be so judgy).

Talked to [colleague] about the better arguments about school performance (M said the other thing we talked about with D__ was how perhaps where we grow up, our “native culture,” does influence us a lot—how M didn’t want to play the corporate game at S___, how D__ may not fit in city). As [colleague] said and I thought, we can’t blame the kids. Yes, test scores aren’t good—but we’d want to argue that that criteria, that assessment—to use the ACT to judge schools—is flawed. And then if we were to compare Rochelle against Hononegah, how they do better, we’d say how local schools probably should respond to their community’s wants and needs (local culture) and Rochelle is not a community that values college.

And there was that meeting yesterday at 5—I doubt much happened. [Colleague] said talking about it with me after school raised his blood pressure. He said it’s foolish, this whole idea that everyone can go to college, that everyone can get a job with a college degree. Krugman wrote about Europe vs. U.S. and the idea is that there’s more social justice, less inequality, in France and Germany, that the U.S. is all-or-nothing in that way, and that once you add U.S. health care costs to our taxes, it’s about the same tax levels as in those countries.

[From journal of Tues., 12 Jan. 2010, Journal 122, pages 77-8]