This article, “Lights, Camera, Inaction,” is not really about the tiny, new Flip Video Mino camera, as I thought it was when I chose to read it. Instead, it’s a funny riff by Michelle Slatalla on the urge so many of us feel to archive our lives with photography, and the guilt we thereby create for ourselves when we fail to do it well.
Years went by without pictures. It became too hard to be the family archivist in an age of ever-changing technology, especially for someone like me who fears any gadget more complicated than a cocktail shaker. Every time I tried, a battery died or a memory card went missing or I pushed the wrong button or accidentally taped over someone’s piano recital.
I liked this comment after her oldest daughter complains because there is only one viewable family video left: “She got good at guilt at college,” Slatalla observes. And she demonstrates Read the rest of this entry »
Remember when you were young and thought you got to decide what you would do when you grew up?
I just read an article in the NYT about the increased popularity of philosophy as an undergraduate major: In a “
I have not commented on the Super Bowl in this blog. Trust me, if my Philadelphia Eagles were in it, I would have had plenty to say. But, I don’t even want to talk about their lousy season.
But part of me loves underdogs and upsets, and this would be an upset all right. It would be right up there with my very first Super Bowl memory, when Joe Namath and the Jets beat the Colts. My dad assured me before the game that the Colts would win, and I was rooting for them (why, I don’t know — maybe I liked the logo on their helmets?).
I was baffled when the Colts lost, not really grasping at that age that those everyone agreed were “the best” could be beaten — that conventional wisdom could be wrong. Maybe I have liked underdogs since then, having seen how much more fun it would have been to have pulled for the Jets when they won. And after all, if they lost, that was what everyone expected, anyway.
Have you ever gone through that career exercise where you write out success stories from your life, and then look back through them for clues about the kind of work you would enjoy and/or be good at? I did that when I decided to leave teaching, my first career. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but while I prepped for the LSATs I worked through all the exercises in “The New Quick Job-Hunting Map,” by Richard Nelson Bolles. It’s a companion workbook to his famous 
