Spanish Alphabet Song – Baby

09/23/2014 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

Just your average 68-year-old college freshman.

The crow’s feet will still be there and you’ll have to come to terms with those jowls and wattles. But people like you are not interested in the shallow cosmetics of youth.

Our search is for a more profound renewal, an intellectual and spiritual innocence. And the key to finding it is within all of us. We can know the promise of youth in its full glory only through total and abject ignorance.

Here how it works. When you can’t begin to understand what a professor is saying, when you can’t process a string of syllables into recognizable sounds or articulate even the simplest thought, your mind curls into the fetal position.

Darwin galapagos lizard

05/23/2014 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

Everywhere you turn you see Charles Darwin around here.

It was sweet while it lasted but we don’t live on the Galapagos anymore. We’re not isolated from all those people who want to do “our” jobs for lower pay. We’ll need to “adapt” as the great naturalist might say. That includes paying for education.

Money saved by going to a two-year community college can pay for the last two years at a university. Instate tuition can save another $20,000 to $60,000 which can help pay for grad school (where, experts say, top-tier programs at elite institutions are most likely to pay off) or pay down student loans.

A woman in my class moved here to live with her grandfather and go to community college. It was a survival-of-the-fittest decision. She plans to major in oceanography. I suspect she and Darwin will run into each other again in the waters off the coast of Ecuador.

Cargo Cults

05/19/2014 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

“Cargo Cults” were scattered across the islands of Melanesia during the middle of the last century. Chapter 14.

Cult members were traumatized by the sudden appearance of wondrous goods being unloaded on their docks and airfields — tools, vehicles, appliances, unimaginable foodstuffs. They were puzzled that those goods weren’t meant for them, that someone else owned them—whatever “own” means.

They felt they had been cheated. So they beseeched their gods and the divine armies that invaded during WWII to come back and bring them their due share.

More recently, our own communities are dotted with islands where UPS and FedEx seldom call and offload. Again, the gods aren’t listening.

fear of ideas, ancient library

05/08/2014 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

Even a humble community college can make people nervous. There are books here and they have ideas on almost every page.

Politicians accuse each other of being from elite colleges, even if they went to Harvard or Yale themselves. They pander to the Swamp People and Alien Hunters in all of us. Today we learned about the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s. They named it themselves.

There are parents who worry the kids they send of to college won’t be the same when they come back home. They should be so lucky.

swiss cheese

05/08/2014 by Pat Shiplett Leave a Comment

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

The more you know, the more you can recognize there are Emmenthaler-sized holes in your understanding of things. You sit in a lecture and you’re shocked to hear about something you’ve gotten wrong your entire adult life. But it doesn’t make you feel stupid.

I always thought “prehistoric” was dinosaurs and cavemen. Actually it describes everything that happened before things started getting written down. I thought our planet has seasons because something tilts back and forth twice a year. No.