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Ichabod!

29 June 2005 17:09

i remarked to zodda a little bit ago that i am far sillier now than i think i ever was at any other point in my life. i was NEVER silly in grade school. i approached everything with a dead seriousness, from contructing a battery in science class to folk dancing in music class. it seemed like the only way to enjoy doing something was to do it REALLY WELL.

then in high school, there was ichabod, and i approached ichabod's being silly with the same dead seriousness. trying to give weight and meaning to absolutely everything. perhaps i was exposed to too much avant garde artwork far too early in my life to ever see gravity as silly? was i aware that my own gravity was silly? im not really sure. there was a flippancy about it, but as always is with teenagers, it was the flippancy that flouts one side while desperately hoping to be embraced by the other.

as i was driving along creek road to scout out places to go kayaking today, i thought about all the hippie-of-the-month pot smokers in my high school class. and how some of them tried to talk to me about the appalachian trail, and told me about their dreams to hike and learn to play harmonica. and i wonder what kind of lives theyre leading now, and if it would be safe to say that i am prolly still the one most nearly living the hippie life, running off to new mexico and singing folk songs, living with crazy artists and indians and scientists?

so now theres a quotidian silliness about my life that if i remember dimly may have been there previous to zodda? i dunno. hard to remember much before lexapro, it was a dark dark time. but teaching sixth graders, how can i not be silly? theyre funny.

and just like my dad said, when he started his second year of teaching he felt so good going into it, knowing that now he had his feet on the ground and thinking "man, i feel sorry for those poor kids i taught last year."

cause i feel the same way about last years seventh graders, they really got the short end of the stick between being stuck in the gym, and combined with the eight grade class, and then not getting to benefit from the kind of teacher i finally morphed into when i had the freedom of my own classroom.

maybe i approach silliness with deadly seriousness because of entropy. when i create order, i have briefly defeated entropy. silliness is a beautiful way of giving into entropy, and yet sad because i spend so much of the rest of my time fighting it. then i go and rejoice in its disorder. the paradox of not only living, but human life and evolution, that life forms overcame disorder and entropy to grow ever more complex. now, thats intelligent design.

yes yes. as my life grows more complex, overcoming entropy, i need to be more and more silly to relieve the horrible stress of constantly driving against that which cannot ultimately be defeated.

so by extension, would death be the ultimate surrender to entropy? i found all of my old math textbooks last night. i want to reteach myself calculus, and i want to read through thermal physics again for fun. that was the best class, EVER. that would indeed give me great satisfaction.