Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
. . . and some breakfast links.
The Christian Science Monitor continues to post daily updates on kidnaped journalist Jill Carroll. She has not been forgotten.
Screw the New York Times firewall. You can find your morning Dowdage at Jurassic Pork’s blog (Happiness is a Warm Gun). My favorite bit from the always scintillating Ms. Dowd:
As Carey Goldberg wrote in The Boston Globe, the most popular Harvard course is one taught by Tal Ben-Shahar about how to shed pathologies.
You’d think just being lucky enough to get that Harvard edge would cause elation. But Ms. Goldberg reported that more than 800 students left smiling and cheering after hearing Dr. Ben-Shahar offer self-help formulas like these: “Learn to fail or fail to learn”; don’t think, “It happened for the best,” but rather, “How can I make the best of what happened?”
He meditated with the students, telling them to “give yourself permission to just be.”
Learn to fail or fail to learn? Is that the sound of one ass-cheek farting, or what?
Although I might sigh over this, it also gives me a feeling of warmth and superiority. I retain a great deal of empathy for Berkeley freshmen, kids who have outshined their high school classmates but now find themselves in a hive populated by nothing but the best and the brightest. While they are working their butts raw to ace Chem 1, or English Composition, or Calculus, their Ivy League colleagues are busy trying to giving themselves permission to just be.
As we used to say in college, you can always tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much.
Karen and I have had first-hand experience with both a public university (Berkeley) and a private university (Stanford), and we’re on agreement on this: One of the main differences between the two is their attitude towards failure. Public schools realize some kids won’t make the grade. Private schools don’t accept failure as an option. Public schools understand that without the possibility of failure, success is meaningless. Private schools see dropouts as a loss of donors (not only the student, but his parents).
But the Ivy Leaguers take care of their own, even Yale dropouts like Dick Cheney. We don’t live in a meritocracy. I dare you to consider our current administration as an example of this, and not say, No duh. Sorry for the double negative.
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I’m going to our county’s Democratic Party fundraising dinner tonight. I predict: dry chicken breast, mushy peas, and lots of pissed-off libruls like me. I’ll let you know how it goes.
D.
Technorati tags: Maureen Dowd, Dick Cheney, Harvard, Ivy League, Jill Carroll
Is it possible to making farting a Zen exercise?
It’s called “The Sound of One Cheek Flapping.” A very advanced technique.
LOL. I love you guys 😉
“Learn to fail or fail to learn” sounds like the ten-a-penny koans spewed by the Sphinx in Mystery Men. Even Ben Stiller’s character was smart enough to see through them.