Tag Archives: quotes

11 Feb. 2016. Curved icicle.

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“If nobody brings in snacks, it won’t really be a party,” said a colleague teacher to some students at the end of 1st hour. 18 Jan.

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6 Feb. Refuse.

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“Jeremiah!” shouted a woman while listening to a call on speaker phone in the dairy department of a local grocery store. I think she was shouting at a little boy who had run off. Or maybe she was shouting for a prophet. 20 Jan.

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Nonfiction is one’s mind encountering some part of the world. There’s no one-book of the world. 21 Jan.

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I like “spoilers.” I dislike narrative tension. I want to know what happens so that I can think about the story rather than just waiting to find out what happens. 25 Jan.

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6 Feb. Shiny ceramic boids.

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“Sometimes ramblings are the most-interesting things to read,” said my student. 25 Jan.

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“‘Cuz I got holes,” said student about why he’s got a coat over his t-shirt in class. 25 Jan.

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6 Feb. My grandma’s 85th birthday cake.

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I write for myself. When I write for others, I get hammy, needy. There’s no money in writing — and why should there be? It’s just ideas, and there’s no lasting value in ideas. Of course I write for myself — why write for any other! I’m just borrowing the language, the words, anyway! 26 Jan.

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I don’t have to explain/rationalize why I like an idea, artwork, etc. Liking something isn’t rational. 27 Jan.

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One upside to being sick [with a cold]: I’ve been less ambitious with writing. 28 Jan.

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6 Feb. 2016. Decorations.

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After I told a student that it’s good to have a hobby outside of one’s job, student said, “Being bored IS my hobby.” 28 Jan.

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A female student walked into class 3rd hour and said, “I’m gonna walk up to him and say [in an insinuating voice], ‘So you LIKE peeling bananas, huh?’” 28 Feb.

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Greek myths, Book of Genesis — whatever happened before there were people existing to witness it can’t be known, can’t be nonfiction, and so must be speculative, fictional, philosophical (definitional), all that. 28 Jan.

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31 Jan. 2016. View northeast from Panera Bread, toward Perryville Road.

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A student said to friends in the hallway after school, “… to be fair, I am an asshole, but still …” 29 Jan.

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At a grocery store in Rockford, I heard a boy say something about needing more bananas. The mom said, “Oh, like we need to buy more than 20 bananas?” What if a kid or kids in the boy’s class want more than one banana each, the boy asked. The teacher would say “one each,” said the mom. 31 Jan.

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4 Feb. 2016. Ice forms pools on a driveway slope.

4 Feb. 2016. When I broke some of the ice dams, crystals were revealed.

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“Go look at him ‘cuz he’s beautiful,” said my former student about a substitute teacher at school this day. 2 Feb.

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The book of Genesis says the Earth was “without form” in the beginning. If we take “form” to be, in part, distinction, we make distinctions in general to have useful ideas. We make useful distinctions. 2 Feb.

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“My ex-boyfriend doesn’t exist,” said student, who was then told that she’s used that joke before. “Do I really say that all the time?” she asked. 2 Feb.

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“Why am I hearing your voice?” I asked a student during poem-writing time. “My voice is beautiful,” said student. “It’s weird as hell,” answered second student. 3 Feb.

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6 Feb. Ice forms.

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Creation stories (like Book of Genesis, Hesiod’s “Theogony”) establish symbols for the purpose of having symbols, common symbols within the group of followers. I suppose this is like how fans of any text — say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy — have common reference points. 4-5 Feb.

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Were I famous, people would want me but for their own (selfish) reasons, and not appreciate me as me. But I don’t often feel appreciated for any reason — I need to let go of bitter, cynical thoughts like that as I age, even if I never get as much appreciation as I’d like. 5 Feb.

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I read an online comment recently that said David Foster Wallace’s book Infinite Jest should’ve been edited down. In Genesis and in Hesiod’s “Theogony,” the chaos that arrives before other things is said to be without form. So is the implication that any work that isn’t well-fitted to a form (like DFW’s novel didn’t fit the novel-form, perhaps) chaotic? 5 Feb.

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One student said of another, “He has moments of brilliance, and moments of ‘you are dumb.’” 5 Feb.

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Said a worker at a Casey’s convenience store to another worker, “I’m not known for losing that kind of stuff.” 8 Feb., about 4:10 p.m.

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13 Feb. 2016

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At the local diner: Kim Waitress pointed to some plates of food and asked the cooks, “Which one’s ‘Easy Onion’?” I like the name “Easy Onion” for a criminal’s name, perhaps. 13 Feb.

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Also at the diner: Ashli Waitress said she needed to pour coffee into both cups on the table “because otherwise the table’s leaning this way,” she explained her compulsive behavior. 14 Feb.

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Ashli Waitress’s pink-ribbon tattoo is on her foot because “I didn’t think my first tatt should be on my tit,” she said. 14 Feb.

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18 Feb. 2016. Rec path.

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“I’d be like, ‘Screw you, Zeus,’” said my sophomore student about what he’d do if he were, like Atlas, asked to hold up the sky. 18 Feb.

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While I was outside on a warm February Saturday, I heard my Neighbor-Dad yelled at his kids, who were in the garage. Neighbor-Mom said, “Are they playing with poison? Go inside and wash your hands.” 20 Feb.

First quote of the new year was 1 January. My wife, as we considered leaving our diner after breakfast, said, “I’m still enjoying my various fluids,” her coffee and her diet soda.

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“Can I punch somebody in the face with my foot?” asked my young friend Amin, definitionally. 1 Jan.

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“Are you giving me dirty looks? They don’t affect me — I teach middle school,” said my young teacher friend Nina. 1 Jan.

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Cold day, country road. Steam clouds from nuclear generating station. 4 Jan. 2016

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“Nobody should have to face this kind of boringness alone,” said my wife as she stayed by my side as I watched an online training video about the ADAAA. 3 Jan.

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I’m as particular a person — as biased, judgmental — a person now as I have ever been. My point is that, while I hope to become wiser and make fairer judgments as I get older, I can’t claim to ever achieve some perspective beyond the particular circumstances of my mind at any particular time. 4 Jan.

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Perhaps there is no meaning to any experience or any physical event until a person makes (thinks, says, or writes) language, until one puts together an interpretation of the experience or event. Meaning is more made than found. 5 Jan.

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Felt a bit of sadness at last night’s sunset (over the prairie grasses and trees where I walked my dog) — but it’s just a mood. Perhaps the sadness was that it’ll still be winter for quite a while yet. 6 Jan.

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Ideas as mental states that exist only once. To write down a thought and later read it back, that’s a different experience than the original thinking — for myself as well as for others who might read and experience the idea. 7 Jan.

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How long it takes to come to terms with — to accept — my own life, with its particulars and limitations. I don’t mean this in a sad way; rather, that it’s taken me years to overcome the ambitious, self-aggrandizing ideas I had for whom I should be, how I should live, etc. 8 Jan.

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As I walked my dog in the street, I saw through a neighbor’s kitchen window that I could see his wooden cabinets. I had heard that this neighbor might have a terminal health condition, and I thought how he may be able to look at his own cabinets now but perhaps one day, he won’t be able to. Of course, he’s not always in his kitchen; he’s often somewhere else. But being dead means one will be “somewhere else” to every place. 8 Jan.

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“From now on, order your OWN food,” said my mother-in-law to my father-in-law, after he complained about cheese being sticky in the baked mostacciolis that he shared with her. 8 Jan.

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“Are you HERE?” said my mother-in-law to my father-in-law, after he asked about something that had just been said. 8 Jan.

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“You don’t lie to people, that’s rude,” said my friend Nina as she related a story about how her grandpa came to the U.S. before she thought he had. 8 Jan.

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At our diner, Ashli Waitress asked if everything were good. “As good as YOU can make us,” my wife said. 9 Jan.

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“The more I can get, why not?” said Ashli Waitress of some woman who may have been hitting on her. 9 Jan.

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“What did I used to think was here?” my mom asked of her smartphone home-screen after my wife and I changed her settings from “easy” to “standard.” 9 Jan.

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In a Slate interview, Dean Strang, a defense attorney in Making a Murderer, is quoted as follows:

shows like CSI foster …  an illusion that courtrooms are places where scientific certainty often can be attained, that it’s the norm to be able to come to scientific certainty in a courtroom. And it’s not, of course. Courtrooms usually are not places where we can come to anything like scientific certainty, where we’re dealing with much more uncertainty even after we’ve heard everything.

After reading that, I thought that science deals with generalizations about things that can be repeated, like how certain chemicals will react when combined in certain conditions. These chemicals always will react this way under the same conditions. But of course, in a crime case, there are not general materials, but particular samples, gathered under unique and particular circumstances — and these are not repeatable at all! Even if a certain blood sample contains a DNA match to a defendant, we don’t know how or when the blood got to the place it was found. There’s far more interpretation required to interpret the data from scientific tests from a crime scene than from a lab setting — basic science seems far simpler in comparison. 9 Jan.

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When English teachers present their students with the definitions of certain terms, and then ask students to classify literary samples by applying these terms, that seems like an Aristotelian autopsy — which is to say, that’s a classic approach, but also a backwards one. As a writer myself, I suspect that most other authors do not write by stringing together a bunch of literary terms and rhetorical structures and calling it a text. Writers don’t start from analyzing but from having an idea or hearing a voice, and I (and, I’m sure, others) write out the words that come to mind, and some of these may use rhetorical devices, but not consciously so. Also, when I write something, it’s because I’m excited to do it, because I feel passion in the doing. I write what I like, and I read what I like. When we ask students to apply terms to texts they don’t really care about, I suspect it’s alienating students from their own passions, their own feelings. This makes me sad because it took me years after completing my collegiate education to learn to trust my own mind, to learn that my own interests and my own ways of using words are good enough, and that this trust and confidence are the real foundation for my intellectual explorations. 11 and 17 Jan.

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Learning who I am from others’ reactions to me, at least partly. Since I was a boy, others told me I’m smart, and I believed them. It’s easy to see how others, defined differently, might grow up to play different roles, and some of these may not be healthy, of course. 13 Jan.

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Illinois floodplain snowstorm. 9 January.

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“We need cheer elves to clean our mats,” said a cheerleader student of mine. 13 Jan.

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As I was reading this article at The Atlantic, I focused on this quote:

Why would the brain evolve such an inaccurate, simplified model of the world? The reason is efficiency. The brain didn’t evolve to get all the scientific details right. That would be a waste of energy and computing time. Instead, it evolved to process information about the world just well enough, and quickly enough, to guide behavior. All the brain’s internal models are simplified caricatures of the world it models.

and this:

The brain processes information. It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That’s the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness.

I’m not sure I share the author’s optimism that these descriptions actually make consciousness “not mysterious,” as the article title claims, but after reading this idea of the brain as having internal models, I thought about maybe the “ego,” the sense of a “me” (as author says), is a program that can get shut down when people meditate or have weird sleep or take certain drugs, such that some of the feelings of “all-is-one”-ness that some people report after meditating is not transcendently true, but is just a different way of experiencing the mind. 14 Jan.

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“It’s nice outside. What the heck — I’m skippin’ work,” said a high school girl after school in the student parking lot. It’s nice to know that it’s not just school but also work that receives consideration of whether to skip or not. 14 Jan.

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I could tell my sophomore English class students to hold two ideas in their minds as we read published literary essays: 1., there are no right answers, and 2. keep trying to find right answers. Also, as both a teacher and a writer, I find myself valuing openness (not being attached to any particular idea, argument, or perspective) as a higher value than particular idea I might advocate. 15 Jan.

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Also, what we’re trying to teach students can be more vague in a literature-and-writing class than in, say, a science or math class. But then, what we’re asking students to do is more fundamental: make meaning. As a teacher, I’m trying to get my students to think, to say interesting things about the texts we read. I want these teenagers to move toward, though they won’t likely arrive at, having the abilities to analyze and create that I, as an adult, have. Of course, my ability to do this has taken me nearly 40 years to develop, and I’m far from perfect, and I don’t exactly know how to teach this, but helping my students develop this ability seems much more a useful goal of education than simply asking students to memorize certain things. 15 Jan.

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Photos are framed and/or cropped so as to remove context. 15 Jan. (See related idea here.)

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Red sky in evening. 14 Jan. 2016

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“I see where your priorities are,” said student to classmate, as a form of what I called “nerd-taunting.” 15 Jan.

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At a scholastic bowl competition, a boy about 12 years old said to a competitor (who may have also been his older sister): “Lexi, can you graph pi?” She responded, “yeah, it’s a straight line.” The boy said, “Nice!” 16 Jan.

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Later, that same Lexi told her teammate Eric, “You just said the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me” and as she retold this anecdote to someone else, she said, “He was like, ‘I wouldn’t say you’re ugly.’” 16 Jan.