Mum + 1

What is special about today?

My mother was born on July 3, 1940. She died 21,627 days later. She never made it to age 60. She didn't quite make it to see the year 2000 and its Y2K hysteria come and go (she missed it by 106 days).

Since she left us, we've moved into three different homes and lived in two different states.

So many pets have since entered our lives. She would have loved and mourned them all.

Family vacations, get-togethers, weekly telephone calls - all missed. I think she really would have loved being able to video chat on a computer or smart-phone (if we could have persuaded her to get one). That technology wasn't really available until quite a while after she died.

Of course, she also missed the 911 attack, the Columbia tragedy, too many school shootings, a special type of imbecile "elected" as president (despite 70% of the voting population NOT having voted for him), and these past few mask-wearing years full of anti-vax and anti-mask dip-shits pushing their selfish agendas. But let's not continue down this particular road of negativity and instead just focus on today.

In fact, I should stop listing things altogether. It would be impossible to detail this loss; trying to do so only suggests that the impact of her passing can be quantified. It cannot.

My focus is really just about today. Today in particular. It is seasonably cold, but there is no snow on the ground nor is snow likely until January. There is nothing very special about today except maybe that it is the day before Christmas.

This will be the 23rd Christmas we get without my mother. She went out of her way to make the holiday special for everyone. This was certainly true for my wife and I who spent most of our holidays far from home and family. She kept us connected and close despite the miles and the cold. In 1999, when she died, she not only took Christmas with her, but all the other holidays, vacations, cook-outs, weekly phone calls… and so much more.

What makes today personally remarkable is that it puts me one day older than what my mother got.

I got "more" but it continues to feel like less.

What I've Been Doing To Usurp Young Minds

I teach college. Or, well, I am a professor in a small private university and so I occasionally speak words out loud to classrooms of assorted technologies, air, furniture, and students. Over the years (omg - so many years) I have developed an occasional habit of not listening to myself and wandering off in my mind to play video games while lecturing.

That isn't something I approve of (nor do I approve of taking naps while driving, nor letting my face show my true feelings when my wife talks about Downtown Abbey or whatever it's called). If my lectures are so boring that even I don't want to listen, we should pity the poor students sitting in the classroom! One solution I have to keep students (and <cough> me) interested is to introduce unusual (BUT ON-TASK) ideas once in a while.

Example: Making up blended words to convey concepts in Sensation and Perception such as "smeat" which is sorta what happens when you smell dog poop on your shoe... you are smelling an odor and your nose is kinda eating it, too. So smell + eat = smeat! (After all, isn't that what somebody once did when they came up with the term "transduction" - seriously... isn't it? Asking for a friend.) I did this very one today, in fact.

Example: Applying principles of Social Psychology to a lecture on how to form and maintain a cult! (A benevolent dictatorship?)

Example: Applying statistics (chi square) in the Methods in Behavioral Research class to FINALLY put to rest the debate about which is better, "over" or "under" when it comes to TP hanging with the bonus resolution to the question of TP usage (folded vs. bunched). Want to know what we found? Take the class, not all education is free!

Example: Back to Sensation and Perception, I have developed a practical application of the vocabulary word "foveate" for personal gains and benefits. NOT to be confused with orbisculate, which is when a grapefruit targets your eye with a juicy squirt. Rather, to foveate is to adjust your gaze on something, like the grapefruit, so that the image is targeted on a specific location on your retina (i.e., the fovea). 

Use "foveate" to claim the last slice of pizza, cake, pie, or lasagna (etc.) by simply saying, "Oh my gosh! Someone foveated all over this last slice... Does anyone want it?" BAM! It's likely to be yours without any fuss! 

Benefits: (1) You get that last slice on the legit (not your job to build other people's vocabulary), (2) you come across as the nice guy for letting everyone know about that disgusting sounding thing that happened to it, and (3) you are viewed as generous for first offerring the slice to others before taking it on yourself. 

Maybe this one should have been kept a secret... if everyone knows it, then it loses its power.

As I write this, we are nearing the end of a long semester of lectures through warm soggy masks. The list above needs to be built upon and I simply lack the effort right now to rehash the past few months. I will return occasionally to build the list so that there are more than four examples. Be patient... you can see that when it comes to blogging, I am a:

Prolific

  Rigorous

    Observant

      Cuddly

        Relatable

          Active

            Smart

              Tenatious

                Insightful

                  Nerdy

                    Affectionate

                      Trustworthy

                        Organized and

                          Reliable

BLOGGER!

[Poster images via FOTOR.COM a very cool site you should check out!]