Thursday, June 28, 2007

Thursday Thirteen

Stealing Ampersand's habit for a day.

#13: It rained, poured, deluged yesterday. It all started during final relaxation in yoga. Just as we lowered our stretched and twisted bodies to our mats, a sudden clap of thunder followed by a shudder of the building led to such a gushing of water, I couldn't concentrate on relaxing. All I wanted to do was to run out into the parking lot, dancing in the showers. We've had drought, so rain was welcome. Apparently Jo(e)'s neck of the woods got a similar downpour.

#12: Relaxed yogis all exited the YMCA into shin deep waters, drenching our cute yoga suits and sweatpants up to mid-calf.

#11: Speaking of yoga: My instructor is named Bevvy Sue. She has a Kentucky drawl. Now that's yoga-vangelical success.... all the way from India to the southern hills of Cincinnati.

#10: Last night was a make-up session for yoga. This instructor (Mary) believes. She uses Hindu words and reminds us to use the energy of the room, to send our thoughts out to the universe, to visualize our full creativity or productivity. She leads the room in chants of "Om" (which she tells us we don't have to participate in if it makes us uncomfortable... a midwestern accommodation, I'm certain). I wondered how this teacher came upon yoga at all (this ain't San Diego), and why she had accepted all the various aspects of its promises, and how she did so without having to torture herself with Christian theological arguments (assuming she never was tortured). It occasionally dawns on me that some people will live entire lives utterly unconcerned with the claims of Christianity.

Somehow I missed that chance.

#9: So You Think You Can Dance is the best reality TV show I watch all year, even though it is also the most self-indulgent. What are they up to now? Like fifteen minutes of debriefing and mutual back-scratching in between every rumba and cha cha? Nigel, let the young ones dance! Enough jawing already.

#8: Was Gary Marshall drunk on this week's episode of "On the Lot"? How else to account for his inability to call contestants by their correct names, his assumption that Vietnamese and Korean are the same language, his inappropriate remarks about Adriana's dress and the blond sitting behind him? And don't get me started on Carrie Fisher. She's scary off script. They need a whole new judging crew or that show will tank.

#7: We're painting two bedrooms at once. Ever done it? Here's how it works. You make a mess out of both rooms, then you keep moving stuff from one room to the next while you drip paint on carpet and comforters in between them. Easy.

#6: Tiger's a daddy and I never mentioned it on this blog. :)

#5: The Reds are in last place (good thing I'm not a fan).

#4: I only have 1198 emails in my in-box. I'm a beast. That's down from 2243 only a week ago.

#3: I don't understand why people (that huge mass of everyone else) don't support their assertions with real data. Grad school ruined me. I get really tired of speculation, supposition and the attempt to torque a writer you respect to a position you assume must be found in his text. And can we please stop all the generalizations? All of them.... :)

#2: I went to a church picnic on Sunday. I know. Me. The pastor took a photo and said, "This is to prove that you, Julie Bogart, attended a church picnic." Even more... it was fun. :) We played frisbee golf.

#1: I have so much work to get done that I only want to write blog posts instead.

7 comments:

carrie said...

#3: I don't understand why people (that huge mass of everyone else) don't support their assertions with real data. Grad school ruined me. I get really tired of speculation, supposition and the attempt to torque a writer you respect to a position you assume must be found in his text. And can we please stop all the generalizations? All of them.... :)


Nope. Sorry. It's how we process, it's how we live. Everyone does it, even you. ;-) It's the way get engage, it's the way we learn, it's the way we slog our way through information, ideas, and advice. I don't have a time to be an expert on everything and I can't look up each and every fact. I go with it. I'm sometimes wrong, I'm partially right. I adjust my thinking when confronted with better information and I go on again. None of us sheds our biases, though. None of us is agenda-free. ;-)

Unknown said...

Everyone does it, even you. ;-)

As evidenced by item #3 itself. Oh the irony.

David Blakeslee said...

It's "disc golf." Not "frisbee golf." Even us native midwesterners know that! :o)

Ampersand said...

#10 & 11 paint quite a picture and make me laugh. Excepting the theological portions, of course.

Unknown said...

Dave, they called it frisbee golf the whole time - Brian and Chuck. Those two! I've never even heard of "disc golf" but I'm open to the correction. :D Oh, and I'm awful at it.

Unknown said...

Carrie, thinking more about your comment... none of us is agenda or bias free. Agreed - which is why support for assertions matters.

Probably a matter of taste. I just don't enjoy slogging through hyperbole, generalizations and speculation. I just don't learn as much.

carrie said...

I don't like slogging through the hyberbole, either. I understand, agree. I just am feeling a little jaded about who isn't including "hyperbole, generalizations and speculation" in their writings. We can all back things up with data, and, in fact, we can use the same data to back up very different conclusions. This is where I am. I'm short on trust for the "experts" in any field. I don't necesarily see conspiracy everwhere I look, but I see blinders. Me included. I don't even trust "data" that much anymore. I might think someone's data is really crap, or taken out of context, or just plain misinterpreted...or just plain wrong.

And when you get into subjective areas, away from the sciences that hopefully can have real data, when you get to areas like analysing what someone else was thinking when they wrote something, well, I don't know how anyone can be "right." (Especially if said writer is now dead.) If it was easy to see what the right data was, or the right take on a writer's position, we wouldn't have much to blog about, would we?? ;-)