Thursday is a pretender, or a matador, or false educational promise

It's Thursday, which means it is almost Friday but not quite.  We still have two-fifths of the classic work-week to get through, which makes Thursday a bit of a pretender. Thursday shouts, "Look–the weekend is almost here!" when really, it's still two full work days away.  A bit like a matador whipping his red cape away from us just as we rush in to gore it, realizing too late it was only a false target.  And I bite every week, spurred on by those few occasions when Thursday becomes Friday (when I have Friday off) and I nail that damned matador and get quickly to the weekend.  But mostly, Thursday the Pretender wins.  I catch a bit of this feeling in the poem The Spanish Hour by J.D. McClatchy when he writes:

The tic tac of balance wheels

will first make him drowsy,

then dream of his uncle, the matador,

saved by his pocket watch

when a jewel-driven bull

nodded off during a pass.

After a couple of days of glorious (albeit cold) all-out blue-sky sunshine, we're back in the normal grey and dripping weather.  Got a top-down drive home yesterday afternoon, though; the first one I've managed in a looooong time.

No post yesterday as I had an all-day leadership team retreat and had the iPod set to shuffle just Sigur Rós tunes.  All day in a cheap plastic chair is rough on the back, but it was a good and productive retreat.  I really like the way these things are moving on our campus.  Now if we could just get even a little stability out of the state budget and various proposals for plugging the revenue shortfall.  None of them are good news for colleges or students.  It is clearly time to stop pretending that we, as a nation, provide access to education for all.  By the end of this next biennium it will take a large amount of cash or student loans even to complete basic educational goals/needs at a community college, even more at a state four-year.  If only we could get a small fraction of the corporate and agricultural subsidies that continue to undermine our health and economy.  We get what we pay for, and we're paying big bucks to those that already have them these days.  Our nation is becoming the Thursday of educational promise.

While I was out of the office yesterday my office's lighting made a very nice self-adjustment.  It's one of those typical institutional efficiency-built offices with fluorescent ceiling light on a grid that ensures even lighting across all surfaces and also, in the days of laptop and tablet computer screens, ensures overhead glare at all points in the office.  Today the light immediately over my desk has died and only my small desk task lamp illuminates that surface directly, with softer indirect lighting from the rest of the ceiling grid.  I like it - I'm leaving those lamps burned out.

The music this morning was mostly quiet and contemplative, apart from the first song out of the gate, or rather, garage.  I don't know if my copy of A Ghost Is Born is flawed or if the album really is this way, but most of the tracks on this album are heavily muted.  They sound like a poor recording, flat and dull, despite the great musicianship.  I may have to borrow someone else's copy to compare.  Two tracks from one album again this morning: lazy iPod.  Good stuff, though.

Here's the full playlist:

 - Wilco: I'm a wheel

 - Sigur Rós: Fljótavik

 - Ludovico Einaudi - Monday

 - Jeremy Fisher: Jolene

 - Ludovico Einaudi: Uno

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