I've felt a bit disconnected of late.
The day of the Boston Marathon, I didn't hear about the bombings until late. I was in the office, and no one mentioned them. That either means that no one knew, because we were all busy at work and not watching TV or whatever, or no one told me for whatever reason.
That's sometimes how it feels here, not only here in my office, my little silo room, but here in the midwest, where the happenings on either coast sometimes seem very far away. But then, happenings over in the Fort also seem far away.
It's like here in the middle of the country, we're actually on the margins of the places that really matter to most of the people in the country.
Anyway, a friend of mine recently showed me this poem by Tom Wayman called "Did I Miss Anything," and it's wonderful, and I want to put it on my syllabus for next year. You should go read it immediately.
On a blog I read sometimes, young person is complaining about looking at jobs and not feeling like any of them are totally inspiring and wonderful, and I feel impatient, beca
I love that poem. I sure get that question a lot -- "did we do anything important?" I want to respond (but don't), "What do YOU think?"
ReplyDeleteThe Boston Marathon bombing has been on my mind a lot because of the little boy who died (in addition to the others who died and were hurt, but the little boy is very close to my eldest's age, so it kind of guts me seeing things about that). I talked about the bombing in my lecture yesterday in Humanities -- only for about two minutes. One of the discussion leaders from the HUM faculty told me today that one of the students said in discussion, "Man, what was UP with that lecture from Dr. Fie yesterday? Geez..." Apparently some people don't want to hear about unhappy things that have "no impact" on them. I swear it was only two minutes, and it was relevant to what I was talking about (dystopic literature, specifically Fahrenheit 451). Many other students liked the lecture and told me so. But then, there are always going to be some people who can't be bothered.