some random thoughts:

I am very frustrated at the results of yesterday’s presidential election. How can 53% of the voters prefer George W. Bush with all his lies, incompetence, and special interests? I fear conditions in this country are going to get worse the next four years before they get better.

Yesterday I was summoned to Jury Duty in December. It’s time to do my patriotic duty which, in my frustration over the election results, does not thrill me at this particular time. After all, we have just re-elected a president who did everything possible to avoid his patriotic duty when he was younger.

I have a four-day weekend due to the annual NJEA Convention. I attended it the past two years, but this year I have so much schoolwork to catch up on, and so much stress to try to drain, that I am going to stay home the next two days and work. Besides my workload, and struggling to learn Statistics, I have one class which is particularly badly-behaved and resistant to learning no matter how hard I try to improve their attitude. It would be so much easier for me to lump all the students in that class into one common-denominator, the way it is done at the other school across town, rather than try to individualize their instruction so they are better prepared for the rest of their high school careers. But I am fundamentally unable to do that, so instead I walk out of that class every afternoon so stressed out that I am sure my blood pressure is suffering because of it.

This weekend I hope to finish reading John Varley’s The Golden Globe, a really fun novel about an itinerant and slightly disreputable actor struggling to make a living out on the Pluto circuit a few centuries in the future. Varley was one of the very best sf writers in the 1970s and 1980s, but then he inexplicably spend a decade writing screenplays in Hollywood–which he admits paid very well but only resulted in a single screenplay actually being produced–before returning to writing. Thank heavens he did!

I am listening to two new “greatest hits” packages that I am enjoying quite a bit, both of them double disks: Jackson Browne and John Mellencamp. Oh, to have such talent...