It Only Takes One...

Greetings,

I admit, I had all but given up blogging until this morning. One friend of mine sent me a text and demanded that I return to the blogosphere. That's all it took, and presto! Here I am again.

I have to admit that the reason I've been gone is not that I've been too busy, or any other such nonsense. I just really haven't had much to talk about. I have become pretty skilled at boiling most of my thoughts down to 140 character tweets, or slightly longer Facebook posts, so spending time elaborating on them here just kind of seemed like a waste of effort. I thought about it more today, though, and have convinced myself that it is worth the effort for one who considers himself something of a writer to practice writing.

So what do I have to say tonight? Well, I think we'll just start with the practice of writing, and maybe discuss values a little bit. My wife and I were having a discussion about this over dinner tonight. I mentioned that I have about three weeks to come up with an argumentative essay for my American Literature class. I further explained that contrary to the parameters imposed by last quarter's British Literature professor, my American lit professor has left the paper's requirements pretty much wide open. It just has to be about a work of American Literature from the period that we are studying (early colonial through the romantic periods, ca. 1620 - 1850), it has to be argumentative, and it should be somewhere around five pages long.

My wife, who would shudder at the thought of doing this kind of assignment, immediately asked if there was some paper that I'd written for a previous class that I could just hand in. At first I just dismissed the thought out of hand, but then, after a moment, I was tempted because I remembered having written a paper about Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem, "The Rhodora: On Being Asked, Whence is the Flower?" This would definitely fit the criteria, but alas, I've decided not to use it. It's not really the fear of getting caught, or anything like that. It's the fear of seeing myself as a fraud. Sure, I wrote the paper, but I wrote it last year in a 200-level class. I am supposed to be a bit better at this by now.

My wife just doesn't get it (and I'm fairly confident that more than a few of you don't get it, either). She understands it on an intellectual level, but she can't empathize with what it means to me. She looks at school as a series of tasks which stand as obstacles in front of an ultimate goal - the degree. I look at it as an opportunity to better myself. Sure, I want the degree, so that I can get a teaching job, but I also want to, as Henry David Thoreau put it, "suck out all the marrow" of the experience. I mean, if I were only in it for the degree, I could just slack off a bunch and get by with C's and B's for grades. That's not good enough for me, though. I get really offended when I take a class and I feel like I'm not getting my money's worth out of it. This quarter's EdPsych class is a perfect example. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know what I'm talking about.

So I guess it all comes back to values. One of my deepest values is the idea that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing to the best of my ability. If my heart's not in it enough to put in a hundred percent, then I shouldn't be doing it in the first place. That, to me, is how you get the most out of life. You make sure that the things on which you spend your time are worth the time you spend.

This might explain why this blog has been vacant for so long lately. Hopefully, though, I'll think of some things worth writing about a little more often from now on.

I am the Reverend Humpy and I have approved this message.