18 January 2001
Last year: One dream involved a snake. At least, I think it was a snake.
Today is my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad!
Some of his friends from the office are taking him out to lunch today, so I'll be going along with them. Hooray for excuses to eat out!
So I went to the doctor yesterday to have him look at my finger. He didn't think it was broken, but wanted to be sure, so he sent me around to the x-ray lab, as I expected. I snuck a peek at the film as I carried it back to the doctor. Finger bones - especially the pinky finger bones - are almost shockingly tiny.
The doctor's diagnosis: I'd strained a ligament, or perhaps torn it a bit. After scolding me for waiting four months before coming to see him, he recommended "buddy-taping" my pinky to my ring finger for a couple of weeks.
This is causing all sorts of awkwardness. I actually took typing classes once, which means I prefer to type with my fingers in the "standard" position, mostly, with a few adjustments to make up for the fact that computer keyboards are much smaller than those of typewriters. But with my fingers buddy-taped, my left ring finger is at about half-mobility, and it's having to do all the work the pinky finger usually does. My typing is slowed considerably.
Also, my wedding and engagement rings were in the way of the tape (and would have pressed uncomfortably against my pinky anyway), so they've been moved to my middle finger, which feels veryweird.
I hope this works. And in the meantime, I suspect my entries will be pretty short, because typing for very long is something of a pain in the ass. I'm just glad my project at work is almost done. (Sortof.)
You want to know what I've been thinking about lately? Education.
This morning on the drive in to work, I was thinking about the fact that the ability to retain and regurgitate information isn't an indication of intelligence - that really, intelligence is the ability to take disparate pieces of information and combine them to draw accurate conclusions. The further apart the pieces of information, the higher the intelligence (well, provided that the conclusions are correct, anyway).
But how would you teach that? And so, because at any given time there's at least a 75% chance that what I'm doing in my head is acting things out, rather than just thinking about them, I spent most of the drive in to work teaching a class in Conclusive Thought.
Really. If the management changeover here at work makes things suck too unbearably, I might well become a teacher. (No, not in Conclusive Thought, silly. There's no such thing. I'd probably be a math or computer science teacher.) It would be an enormous pay cut, but Matt's last couple of raises were pretty impressive (owing to the corporate buy-out over at his office), so I don't think it would hurt us too terribly.
The more I think about it, the more I'd like to teach. If it weren't for the fact that the idea of teaching adults is just as satisfying as the idea of teaching kids, I'd think it was the faint echo of my ticking biological clock. Heck, maybe it is, anyway. (Speaking of biological clocks, this was one of the most moving things I've read, ever.)
Just a little scattershot of thought to wrap up with...
Word of the Day:
infix - a derivational or inflectional affix appearing in the body of a word (e.g., you would make the word "spoonful" plural by adding the infix 's', thus: "spoonsful" Also, slang: "Abso-damn-lutely!" or "Fan-freaking-tastic!")
Currently Reading:
- The second King's Daggers book by Dave Duncan, but I can't remember its title.
Current Projects:
- Kris' afghan (on hold while my fingers are taped)