Category: Personal Itinerary
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How I stopped smoking…
I managed to inveigle my first pack of cigarettes when I was twelve years old from my Grandfather. During the summer months prior to Eisenhower’s first term for the presidency, “Eisenhower for President” and “Stevenson for President” cigarette packs in colors of red, white, and blue could be purchased at tobacconists. I told my grandfather…
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No More Cardinal Newman’s Idea of a University
What is it like to be a professor today in “soft disciplines” defined as “other than science, technology, and engineering”? The humanities and social sciences are soft disciplines. Psychology, sociology, political science, language, gender studies, business majors, and the like are soft disciplines. Soft disciplines have in common complex causality, weak and competing methodology, disciplinary…
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College Reunion Blues
My dear ever-loving Alma Mater, the University of Redacted, sent me at least three notices that the Class of ‘XX would celebrate the XXth anniversary of their graduation. I doubt if the language of celebration exactly resonated with my feelings. I wondered if the class of ‘XX were ambulatory. I envisioned platoons of corpulent, gray/…
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Thank God for Denial
As I contemplate aging, and I can have no doubt that it is happening to me since I am to endure my another birthday in another week, I have been thrust into reflections on aging. Let me be candid: My favorite posture in the face of the clock’s tortuous inevitable measure of the unseen yardstick of…
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My Adventures with Meditation
My history of meditation is humorous since I have approached meditation with the same fast-food consciousness that Americans tend to approach all aspects of their lives from diet to human relations. The first time I meditated I was sixteen years old. I had just read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, and I picked-up some of the descriptions…
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Got to Get Your Motion Quotient
After years existing in the happy land of child development theory, as new parents, my wife and I have had the opportunity to bridge theory with practice. As an aside, we much prefer the eloquence, clarity, and cleanliness of theory to the nastiness of practice. Nevertheless, practice we must, since our baby, First Born, does…