I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately.
A snatch of a poem my grandmother used to quote about finding meaning
in work came to mind:
Oh, you gotta get a glory
In the work you do;
A hallelujah chorus
In the heart of you.
Paint, or tell a story,
Sing, or shovel coal,
But you gotta get a glory
Or the job lacks soul.
Berton Baley
Even Google and Duck-Duck Go don’t know much about it, so here it is
in my grandmothers handwriting. From cleaning houses, to taking care
of kids, to canning beans she NEVER did anything halfway.
I watched the Super Bowl last night, in which a second Ohio team just
missed a national championship in a year. There is no joy in
Porkopolis. I don’t know any good football poems, but…
The Iliad and Dr Seuss have nothing to say to us today. “One fish, two
fish”? Really. Recent translations of liner-A tablets reveal that it
was a faceBOOK post that launched 1000 ships.
Today was the day I made the choice to live for an entire work-day on
an IPv6-only network. And it worked. I’ve been watching this slow
train comin’ for 30 years. Now I’m holding my breath for CNLP :-)
I had not been out much lately (winter, cold), but this reminded why I
hike. You get to the top (in this case, of “Mary’s Rock”) and have
breathtaking views (often when you are already out of breath :-).
There is the sense of accomplishment in having finished the climb (in
this case a modest ~1000 plus feet up, 1.5 miles). You meet people (I
met an older gentleman with a camera, and we stopped and talked
photography for 20 minutes, I ran into some old friends). You have
time to think (assuming you don’t blast music or podcasts into your
brain while you could be letting it enjoy the quite of nature). And
it’s fun.
This may be obvious to people who are fluent in several languages, but
communicating in different languages does not have to be like working a proof in
geometry. The Latin I learned focused on being able to consciously understand
all 144 different inflected forms (yes, 144) of any standard Latin
verb. Pretty sure most children in antiquity could not separate a
genitive geurnd from a supine from a plural perfect passive
participle. But they could talk.
Illuminati is a game that allows you indulge your inner conspiracy
theorist, hopefully in a self-aware tongue-in-cheek manner. My son
apparently made off with my copy. I think he’s in on it. He took it as part
of a secret communist conspiracy to keep me from suspecting the truth
about secret communist conspiracies…
Pretty sure I won’t make it daily, but I’ve got a huge backlog of
ideas (from my daily paper journal, email to friends, etc) and now, a
place I feel good about to put them out.
These are some musings I sent to a friend who is a career counselor at
a local community college.
Short version: I’m pretty sure I could not have planned my current
career in “IT” and “Cybersecurity” when neither of those terms even
existed until well into my career.
