Reading Now...

What does your reading list say about you? Mine generally confirms my inability to fit neatly into any one category, except maybe "Miscellany."

for the Elmont Book Club ... Transatlantic by Colum McCann
for Mercy College course work ... articles, texts on leadership, educational governance, and administration
for BUFSD -- "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" a short story
Other recent reads .... Aging with Grace: The Nun Study and Alzheimers

Ongoing daily reading: Give Us This Day (readings of the day)
                                      Abide by Macrina Weideicker

Thank You, Nora Ephron

How many women have uttered the line, "I'll have what she's having"? Unlike men, women do not generally quote lines back and forth at each other, yet Ephron's slightly dirty little gem remains an exception. Many Ephron one liners have found their way into the collective unconscious of modern Americans. A friend of mine quotes a favorite line from When Harry Met Sally:  There are two kinds of people in the world --  those who love Neil Diamond and those who hate him. Or is it Barry Manilow? 

And now, I have arrived at the age at which the brutal honesty of "I Feel Bad About My Neck" and "I Remember Nothing" make me laugh out loud.  Even on this sad day, Nora Ephron's list of things will miss when she's gone makes me smile:  

taking a bath

coming over the bridge to Manhattan

pie 

Rest in Peace, Ms. Ephron and thanks for your great good humor and wry words of wisdom.

Twitter Me This @mchannon2020

Spent a good part of today online -- yahoo, Google docs, or actually, Google apps, Facebook, and yes, navigating my newly created Twitter account. I now follow 30 people and I tweeted twice, go figure. I also began creating then and abandoning a website via Wix and another via Google. I barely blog, there's no way I would update a website. 


I will ask permission to unblock Google apps or at least, docs and Gmail for faculty; it's a powerful tool for communication and collaboration. We shall see. Now back to the TDL I created on Google docs and haven't looked at since.


Figure out the 2020?

Love Good Sentences

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  
                        Final sentence of The Great Gatsby.


“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”  

                       Opening sentence of The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

“I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.”
                       Opening sentence, Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

A Gem from F. Scott

"There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion."

When will I ever learn?

Sometimes I feel like the warden on the receiving end of Tim Robbins' classic  "How can you be so obtuse?" comment in The Shawshank Redemption. I should just throw myself in the brig for a month or two until I learn my lesson. It is indeed remarkable this ability I've perfected of losing sight of the big picture and entangling myself in minutiae.  Or, I'll realize I've been traveling Magoo-like down a certain path, oblivious to falling buildings and disappearing bridges. It's truly mind boggling.  And I thought I was Miss Smarty Pants.

The Summer of My Posterior Tibial Tendon

Somewhere in this blog or maybe the last, or the one before that, I swore off "to do" lists. This lasted maybe a week. I cannot survive without them, even if I sometimes, okay, often neglect their commands. Being home most of the summer recuperating from surgery should have been a great time to tackle many tdl items, but alas not so. Did a lot more thinking about doing than actual doing -- a virtual experience indeed. What has emerged is a more realistic sense of professional purpose and direction,  a reaffirmation of the importance of being fully present, and a desire to cultivate a more centered spiritual life. Of course, the work lies in moving from the virtual to the actual. Time will tell.

Wow and I just had a little ankle surgery.