Tasks for the Day

1.  Go to church
2.  Go grocery shopping
3.  Do laundry (including folding it)
4.  Read for class this week
5.  Play with the Dragon Baby
6.  Convince myself that doing what I feel passionate about rather than what I feel like I should be doing is in fact doing what I should be doing and that I do not have to spend the rest of my life eating cold oatmeal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my blog post. I look forward to hearing what you think!

F.B.

Popular posts from this blog

Learning Curve

Mainly, but not exclusively for foil Being able to assume en garde correctly. Being able to advance and retreat correctly. Being able to hold one's weapon correctly. Being able to make an extension correctly. Being able to land a touch correctly with one's opponent standing still. Being able to make a parry correctly. Being able to retreat while making a parry correctly. Being able to see an attack coming after it has started. Being able to see an attack as it starts. Being able to parry an attack. Being able to make a riposte. Being able to initiate an attack. Being able to feel the difference between an attack and a counterattack. Being able to feel the correct distance for making an attack. Being able to see an opening for making an attack. Being able to understand priority. Being able to tell the difference between a stronger and a weaker fencer. Being able to finish one's attacks without trying to take a parry. Being able to be patient, not rushing one's attacks. B...
Keep reading

Make Culture Christian Again

Image
Everyone agrees. The West has a problem. For good or for ill, what we used to call “Western civilization” is crumbling. The monuments of its past are being pulled down. Its heroes are being wiped from the public memory. Efforts at stemming the loss are vilified as “racist” and “white supremacist.” Nobody in polite society wants to be associated with its institutions and ideals anymore. Particularly not with Christianity. Even in so-called conservative circles, to call oneself “Christian”—as opposed to “Judeo-Christian”—is something of a faux pas . A bit gauche. Definitely lowbrow. Not particularly intellectual. Certainly not something a rational thinker would wholeheartedly embrace. Well, perhaps it is okay to be Christian in the circles I frequent online, but then I have never been invited to the right cocktail parties. Not that I would have any idea how to behave. Then again, as they say, turnabout is fair play. I’m a Christian, and Christianity has always been a bit embarras...
Keep reading

Medieval History 101: The Unauthorized Version

Image
Welcome to my Random Laypersons ! Welcome to the VFM, welcome to the Dread Ilk, welcome to the Reprehensibles, welcome to the Unauthorized , and welcome to the Bears!  This is the History Course you have been waiting for!  Or, rather, it will be, as soon as I get some feedback from you. I was greatly encouraged when Vox asked you the other night about whether you would be interested in such a course and so many of you said, “Yes—as long as it is real  history!” As Fencing Bear would put it, “ Three cheers !”  We are thinking about having a video a week, starting this summer.  The first question that I have is about format. What kind of format would make for a good course online?  What I do not want is to have these videos simply be lectures, the canonical professor-talks-while-the-students-doze lectures you get in the movies before the professor starts encouraging the students to stand on their desks.   I wan...
Keep reading

An Open Letter to the President and Provost of the University of Chicago: Save Our School

Image
Originally sent directly by email Wednesday, January 12, 2022, from Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Department of History, The University of Chicago Dear Paul and Ka Yee, The mainstream narrative is starting to shift. We are going to lose our brand if it shifts and we are not in front of it. WE are the University of Chicago. WE ask the Big Questions and risk being out on the edge of scientific research. WE are the scholars who do not simply follow the trends, but set them.  We have embarrassed ourselves for too long—ever since we fell in step with everyone else over the fear. WE should have been the ones with faculty publishing op-eds calling for transparency in testing, not the ones locking our students in their dorm rooms. WE should have been the ones signing the Great Barrington Declaration and siding with SCIENTISTS and DOCTORS who have been willing to risk their careers rather than let their patients die because they wouldn't treat them except at the government’s direction. NOW...
Keep reading

Hot Button Issues, No. 4: Talking Politics

Image
At all.  As my liberal friends on Facebook have made me abundantly aware these past several weeks every time I have posted even the mildest endorsements of the candidate running against our incumbent.  As my family has made clear as a condition for visiting at Thanksgiving.  Talking politics in and of itself is a hot button issue.  Unless, of course, you simply agree with me. Why should this be?  (I know, it's me being naïve again, but here we go.)  "Don't talk religion or politics except to very intimate friends," or so Lily Haxworth Wallace advised way back in 1941 in her New American Etiquette .  On that count, however, I have no intimates, at least politically.  Or the ones that I do have are all at the National Review .  Plus Barry (hi, Barry!), my oldest friend in the world (albeit three months younger than me), and Prof. Mondo , whom I know only from the blogosphere. And maybe you, if you're reading this now.  (Maybe.)  ...
Keep reading