I’m in the office early; I met my boxing trainer at 5:30 this morning instead of the usual 6:00. It was a late night last night for us as well; we spent the day with my stepmother and sister in Santa Barbara. Lots of traffic coming back to Los Angeles, and we had “chinchilla duty” awaiting us. (With seven chinchillas, playtime takes an absolute minimum of ninety minutes a night.)
We stopped by the Santa Barbara cemetary yesterday morning. My father’s headstone is at last in place, and as I had expected, I became a bit tearful at seeing it for the first time. In the afternoon, we walked around the lagoon at UCSB where I had first walked with him as a toddler nearly forty years ago. It was a lovely, breezy, warm day. And though people always say this sort of thing, nearly a year and a half after his death, I still can’t believe my father is gone. Except that in some important sense, he isn’t.
And at Inside Higher Education, an expanded version of my post from a few weeks back on “educrats.” I changed what I thought were the weakest parts of the piece, but kept the polemical tone in place.
More to come.
I’m glad you got that published at IHE but I’m once again disheartened by the spirit and tenor of the comment sections there.
I’m more or less nodding in agreement throughout your essay, but I still hold out hope that some of these people have something to offer, so I try, when it’s feasible, to take them seriously. Probably in 10 years, I’ll be sitting in the back with you, though.