lifting a fat broth

Was reading Carl Sandburg's Smoke and Steel again this morning. "Soup" will be my favorite forever, but the following is a close second.

Hats
Hats, where do you belong?
 what is under you?

On the rim of a skyscraper’s forehead
I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:
Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,
Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.
 Hats: tell me your high hopes.

People don't really wear hats quite so much anymore. This is fine as we have plenty of other accessories to worry about. Feel free to replace "hats" with "phones" if you must.

A bloody resistor

This Intel announcement is interesting - in short, they're trying to phase out use of raw materials (in this case, rare metals like tantalum) sourced from conflict regions in Africa. This is certainly one of the human rights bottlenecks for the information age. It's really difficult to enjoy cheap, bleeding-edge consumer technology without getting a child, a soldier, or a child soldier involved at some stage of the process.

I'm generally skeptical of corporate announcements but I genuinely hope this Intel thing isn't just the human rights equivalent of greenwashing.  It would be insulting to see the consumer electronics market fragmented into "cheap n' bloody" vs. "conflict-free" products like what happened with diamonds. The problem with diamonds is that they're still valuable no matter who is buying or selling them. Perhaps the inherent brief period between release and obsolescence can enable consumer electronics to avoid that issue, at least.

Alma Mater

How many altars does this school have?

On the continuing subject of Old School Papers, that's my high school anthem up there. As far as I am concerned, a school's Fight Song, Alma Mater, anthem, official cheer, et al. are really all the same set of Mad Libs. The Downingtown High School Alumni Association claims to be the "Oldest Continuously Meeting Public High School Alumni Association" in the US, so this song may originate with them and their older times. 

I don't really have any special attachment to this high school in particular. It's not a bad institution by any means and is scholastically superior to many in the surrounding area (a claim I'm not going to bother proving). Most of my fond memories are just about the people and events during high school rather than as part of the good ol' laudable High School Noble Deeds Experience. I am occasionally curious about what it would be like to own a pair of rose-tinted specs. Perhaps they would allow me to use the word "specs" un-ironically. 

Disclaimer: I'm taking a personal development course

Some comments on an IEP from the 3rd grade.

The internet is a strange place in that I've grown so used to it actively promoting anonymity even when recent trends on social networks and the like champion having a public face for the meatspace self. It's nice to be able to present content devoid of personal context or at least pretend that my online self is somehow independent of the remainder of my personality. That may just be escapism.

What I really want to talk about is the 3rd grade.

I'm not in elementary school anymore so my 3rd grade identity sits in the same shadow as all other personal histories, fictional or otherwise. That's my Individualized Educational Program up there. It says I was on or above grade level but I can't take that too personally: a latent sense of over-achievement tells me that it really should say "...may be far above grade level as our current metrics are unprepared for his intellectual might" while the pragmatic cynicism pipes suggests, "that's just a boilerplate response and you should focus on the details". This is the usual sensation I get when reading over old school materials. I wasn't really an overachiever in school at all but looking back causes me to feel like I really should have tried harder. That would have been difficult, of course, as I'm still not really sure what the behavior of trying hard looks like.

I still pride myself in my ability to pick apart the complexity inherent to cause and effect. How about all those other traits? Maybe a checklist would help:

• Generates many ideas/solutions to problems: Maybe too many?
• Able to apply critical thinking skills appropriately: Not entirely sure what this means. When is critical thinking inappropriate?
• Seems to have a flair for the dramatics: Yeah, that one shows up on every IEP after 2nd grade or so. Yeah, it's still true. No, I can't tell if that's a backhanded compliment.
• Needs a stimulating environment: Still true. I can't really tolerate the idea of thinking about the same few issues every day. Pure office jobs are rather hellish.
• Needs to work on strengthening group skills: This has improved substantially! I can't believe that any school kid is actually skilled at working in a group. Doing theatre in college probably helped more than any class project ever did, even in high school.
• Frustration, failure to understand, etc.: This may still be the case, but my daily routine is now so overstuffed with things I don't understand that I have to take a more Zen-like, let-the-river-flow-around-me type of approach.

Overall: Not the same person I was in the 3rd grade. It's for the best.

éventer

I'd like to think I was an introspective child. I certainly tend to be introspective now, so that hasn't changed too much. What has changed is the subject of the introspection and the potential role.

As a child, I didn't have to concern myself with why I was concerned about the future. It's just a natural element of being young. Kids don't have the background knowledge necessary to make rational predictions about the directions they're heading, so they're left with nothing but imagination. A bit of creative thought tends to push introspection toward the fantastical, of course, so it's difficult to even begin to consider such mundane concepts as "where will I be living a decade from now". None of those thought processes really mattered, though! They didn't need to resolve any issues and were really just fun.

That's potentially the greatest loss inflicted by adulthood: the inability to think without purpose or intent. Maturity brings so many issues to face each day that any choice which doesn't work to solve such issues resembles avoidance. I genuinely miss the opportunities to be purely creative. Sure, it's easier to realize your influences as youthful naïveté erodes, but at least a portion of that childish imagination is the sincere willingness to disregard intent, at least briefly. I can never get that back.