Today is the thirty-first of January, and this month I’ve taken my cue from WordPress writing prompts called bloganuary. I’m using up all available time, and I am behind, so I am getting here with a thought that bloganuary for me might run a little while into February.
I like to exercise my ability to reason, which is part of why I blog. In addition to interacting with other bloggers, there are other things I like about blogging, but writing prompts like bloguanary make me feel like I’m learning from others’ ideas and applying my own understanding to them. I appreciate it, which is likely a similar thing numerous different bloggers appreciate. I know a little about blogging professionally, but I’m not sure I would ever try that. A small hobbyist blog is easier to manage, and if money is not changing hands, there is a little less to worry about.
My love of reading helped challenge my instinct for the intellectual back then, and I enjoyed school because I was asked to apply my own skills to instructional activities, but I don’t think I ever developed the study skills to become an academic myself. As a result of my godfather asking if I would be interested in assisting him with his research, I was able to gain some insight that a ninth or tenth grader might not otherwise have.
I observe these plunges into my own mind to see what I can incite in myself and how I can address it on the page. Bloganuary has been fun this month. As for now, it’s been a strong month for my blog, but I’m hoping to return to my usual kind of “studied foray” in the future. Thanks to WordPress for organizing the prompts.
I am blogging the month of January with inspiration from WordPress writing prompts. I am pleased that they have been supportive.
Something people rail against is the cumulative onset of time. There is seldom enough time. Time is scarce. Sometimes time is money. Sometimes we lose track of time.
I wish I knew how to turn back time. I wish it was no more difficult than, say, picking out clothes from the rack. This one, that one, this one, that one.
The Man of Steel turns back time at the end of the 1978 blockbuster, the one titled Superman. It’s the Richard Donner-directed special effects bonanza with Christopher Reeve in the cast as Superman and Margot Kidder as Lois Lane. In the movie, Superman’s asked to choose between keeping a promise or saving Lois. In his anger, Superman challenges the authority of his father and turns back the Earth’s rotation, turning back time, so that he has more time to rescue Lois before she meets her end.
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I am not angry that the time is beginning to run long behind me. That said, I wish there was a little longer left to perfect a few more things before the eventuality that possibly the best I’ll have done is behind me. That is an uncomfortable thought, and while perhaps ability is not yet lost, I am not sure I will have much time left for holding onto the passions of youth.
There could be mercy, that ambition dulls with time, the self-same progress, and satisfaction emerges from what mastery was achieved. It’s important to understand that there are many more young people. There is nothing terrible about having mellowed. I wish for it, as opposed to being irate that there wasn’t additional time. Every person has the same chances, give or take. Some people are lucky, and some are not.
Today, September 8, is International Literacy Day. It was celebrated for the first time in 1967. Its aim is to highlight the importance of literacy to individuals, communities, and societies. Celebrations take place in various countries.
From Wikipedia, Retrieved 7 August 2012.
If you are intellectually-minded, you will probably find yourself reading a number of works of literature, the best-regarded and the most-often cited.
Photographer: Jess Watters
I completed two semesters of literature in college, the second part of 1996 and the first of 1997. The curriculum included a lot of assigned reading material. It required devoting a good distribution of time outside of lectures and seminars to turning the pages of important writing, historical in the sense it is enduring.
No one disputes that a lot of partying goes on in college. I’m a mortal, however. I wasn’t going to the bar environs with my friends much at all, as many peers were doing. I didn’t see any way around reading in my room, at least some of the time.
I’d been in eleventh grade between 1993 and 1994. I had elected to take, as one of my high school courses, the subject of ancient history.
When the summer of 1994 arrived, Mr. Simpson, the gentleman who was teaching an ancient history class, signed my 1994 school yearbook with a note that he predicted I’d spend my life doing a lot of reading. I think he felt I was a smart student.
Ancient history explained what human life was like, as best we could calculate in the day, life in ancient times when other civilizations than the present existed around the planet. It reminded me a little of the game Dungeons & Dragons.
Mr. Simpson taught us about nations such as the Roman Empire. I’ve inferred that the historical Roman Empire inspired some of the gameplay of nineteen seventies’ Dungeons & Dragons.
In the school board governing my high school, in the first part of the year 1996, the teachers went on a work-to-rule. It was my “grade 13,” the year that tried to most closely prepare students if they stayed in schooling.
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“Work-to-rule” meant that high school teachers would only work the hours specifically matched to the student timetable and that teachers wouldn’t support any outside activity or assign homework. It was worrisome because I needed to get a jump on the skills I’d need for college. The teachers I had on hand to me simply weren’t working other than carrying out the minimum effort possible.
“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise”
I might not have got into so much bother at that time. I feel I wasted time partying with friends, as there was no homework to be done and I was characteristically young, an early student. I wasn’t a self-starter, I would say, as I wasn’t challenging myself to learn all the essential skills to start college.
I didn’t have much help from our teachers–none of the students did–and when it came time to start college, I had a disadvantage.
It was a bad break. My college grades dipped more than I would have liked, more than they might have had I taken the initiative to develop study skills necessary to deliver the goods in college.
I mentioned the game Dungeons & Dragons. In various editions of Dungeons & Dragons “initiative” is a rule that game players help decide strategy combat by dice rolls which inform which game character has the first choice to act in the rounds of battle, an advantage in being first.
I should have tried to win the initiative roll. I plainly didn’t. I regret it to this day.
I certainly ask for you to “like,” comment, and/or follow. I wish you well in your own “game.” Good luck to you, however you decide to play your hand.
The Myth of the Independent Blogger and How I Learned to Love It 